Effective

These are the service terms for every client. When you sign up, you sign a service agreement with your plan, prices and launch details, and these terms are part of it. If anything here is different from your signed agreement, your agreement wins.

About these terms

  • These are the service terms of Porchlight, a sole proprietorship based in Alberta (“we” and “us”). They apply to every website and plan we provide.
  • Our services are for businesses, not for personal or household use. “You” means the business that signs the agreement, and whoever signs confirms they’re allowed to sign for it.
  • We work with businesses anywhere in Canada.

The launch package

  • $490 to launch, then from $39 a month with a 12-month minimum, plus applicable taxes. The $490 is paid once: $245 when you sign and $245 at launch.
  • Up to 5 pages, built from our template for your type of business.
  • We write the copy. Photos and details come from you or your Google and Instagram.
  • 2 rounds of revisions before launch. A round is one set of changes you send us together; we make them and show you the result.
  • We launch within 14 days of receiving your content, on a date we agree together. If some content is still missing, we launch on that date and add it later as a monthly change.
  • Your site goes live once the payment at launch is made.
  • You can end the agreement by email before launch. If the work stalls for 60 days because we’re waiting on you, we can agree on a launch date with what we have, or either of us can end the agreement by email. If it ends before launch, you owe nothing more, and “Refunds” explains what happens to your payment.

Monthly plans

  • Care is $39 a month. Growth is $59 a month. Or pay yearly: $429 for Care or $649 for Growth, which is one month free. Plus applicable taxes.
  • Your plan starts at launch.
  • Monthly plans have a 12-month minimum. It counts from launch.
  • After the minimum, your plan carries on month to month, or year to year if you pay yearly, until you cancel.

Changes to your site

  • Care includes 1 minor change a month. Growth includes 2, and Growth requests are handled before Care requests.
  • Minor changes are: edit text; swap photos; update hours, prices or menu items; add a promotion or announcement banner.
  • Not minor changes, and priced separately: new pages or sections; redesigns; new integrations; rewriting a full menu or services list.
  • Unused changes don’t carry over to the next month.
  • Extra minor changes are $35 each. New pages are $150. Larger changes are $75 an hour, quoted before work starts. All prices are plus applicable taxes. If a request goes past your monthly allowance, we tell you the price before we do it.
  • Before we start quoted work, we send you the price, and we start once you accept it in writing. Email is fine.
  • Change requests come in through our request form, not by text or phone.

Paying

  • Prices are in Canadian dollars, plus applicable taxes.
  • When you give us a card, you allow us to charge it through Stripe without asking each time: the payment at launch, your plan fee each month (or each year) until your plan ends, and extras or quoted work you’ve asked for, once they’re done. The amounts are the ones in your signed agreement, in a quote you’ve accepted, or in a price change we’ve given you notice of, and each charge is plus applicable taxes. The charges stop when your plan ends, as “Cancelling and ending” explains.
  • Monthly fees are charged to your card automatically. If a payment fails, we try the card again. Yearly fees are charged the same way, once a year. Please keep a working card on file.
  • Extras and quoted work are charged to your card once the work is done, unless the quote says otherwise.
  • A site that stays unpaid for 30 days is paused. Paused means it’s taken offline. We put it back online as soon as the account is paid. Pausing doesn’t stop your plan or its minimum.
  • If the account is still unpaid 30 days after we pause the site, we may end your agreement. You’d still owe what’s unpaid and the monthly fees for the rest of your minimum.
  • If a charge looks wrong, please tell us before you dispute it with your bank. We refund any charge made by mistake.
  • Referrals: For every business you refer that signs with us, you get one month free. It counts once the business you referred has paid for its launch. We then take it off your next plan fee (on a yearly plan, we add it to your year). It has no cash value. We can change or end the referral offer with notice, and rewards already earned stay yours.

Refunds

  • The payment at signing is a non-refundable deposit that pays for the work to start. It isn’t refunded if you change your mind after you sign, or if the work stops because we’ve been waiting on you.
  • If we can’t deliver your site, or we end the agreement before launch for a reason that isn’t yours, we refund everything you’ve paid for the launch package.
  • Monthly and yearly fees aren’t refunded for part of a month or year. The exception: if we end your plan early for a reason that isn’t yours, we refund the fees for the time after it ends.
  • Extras and quoted work aren’t refunded once the work is done. If you’ve paid for work we don’t do, we refund it.
  • A charge made by mistake is always refunded in full.
  • Refunds go back to the card or account you paid with.

Cancelling and ending

  • After the 12-month minimum, you can cancel with 30 days’ notice. We hand over your site files on request.
  • You can give notice by email at any time, even during the minimum. A monthly plan then ends 30 days after your notice or at the end of the minimum, whichever comes later.
  • Paid monthly: we don’t charge for any month that starts after your plan ends. If it ends part-way through a month you’ve paid for, your site stays online to the end of that month.
  • Paid yearly: to stop your next yearly renewal, give notice at least 30 days before your renewal date. Your plan then runs to the end of the year you’ve paid for. Notice given later than that stops the renewal after it, so your plan renews once more first.
  • Leaving early: if you want your site taken down or moved before your minimum ends, we can do that, but the monthly fees for the rest of the minimum are still charged each month as usual (or all at once, if you prefer).
  • When your plan ends, we hand over your site files if you ask, as long as your account is paid up. Your domain is already yours, so you can point it to a new host. Once the time you’ve paid for runs out, we take your site off our hosting, and we delete your content and logins as our privacy policy says.
  • We can end your agreement with 30 days’ notice for any reason. You then owe nothing for the rest of your minimum, we refund any fees you’ve paid for time after it ends, and we hand over your site files.
  • Either of us can end the agreement by email if the other seriously breaks it and doesn’t put it right within 30 days of being told. If you end it because we broke it, you owe nothing for the rest of your minimum, and we refund fees you’ve paid for time after it ends. Unpaid accounts follow the steps under “Paying”.
  • We can take down anything on your site that’s illegal, or that puts your site or other sites at risk (after a hack, for example). We’ll tell you right away.

What you own

  • Your domain is registered in your name, in an account you control. Its yearly fee is paid to the company you register it with, separately from our prices. If you give us access to manage it, you can take that access back at any time.
  • All of your content is yours: your logo, photos, text and anything else you give us. You let us use it to build, run and back up your site.
  • The words we write for your site become yours once your launch package is paid, and we waive our moral rights in them.
  • Our templates, code and designs stay ours, and we reuse them for other clients. Once your launch package is paid, you have a permanent right to use, copy, change and host your site’s files for your own business, with any host, even after you leave us. You can’t resell our templates or code as templates of your own.
  • Some parts of your site, like fonts and open-source code, belong to others, and their licences allow this use.
  • A demo we show you before you sign up stays ours.
  • We show your site in our portfolio, or name you as a client, only if you say yes in writing. You can change your mind at any time, and we’ll take it down.

Your part

  • Send us the content and answers we need, and review your site when we ask.
  • Only send us content you have the right to use, like your own photos and logo, or ones you have permission to use.
  • If we use photos from your Google or Instagram, check they’re yours to use: photos customers post on your Google profile belong to them.
  • Make sure what your site says about your business is accurate and lawful, like your prices, hours, licences and claims about your products or services. We write the words, but you know your business, so please check them before launch.
  • Your business is responsible for its own duties to its customers, like having a privacy policy if it needs one, and for how it uses the messages they send through your site. We’ll tell you which services your site uses and where they keep its messages (our host, Cloudflare, is in the United States), so your privacy policy can name them.
  • Keep your accounts with other companies active and paid: your domain, your Google Business Profile, and any booking or ordering platforms.
  • Where you can, give us our own access to an account instead of sharing your password.

Platforms you use

  • We connect booking, ordering, reservation and payment platforms that you choose. They have their own terms, fees and privacy policies.
  • If a platform you use changes or shuts down, connecting a new one is a new integration, which we quote before we start.
  • We’re not responsible for their outages, fees or changes.

What we promise, and what we don’t

  • We do our work with reasonable care and skill. While your plan is active, if something we built doesn’t work as agreed, tell us, and we’ll fix it at no charge.
  • While your plan is active, we keep your site’s hosting, security certificate, backups and uptime monitoring running.
  • We don’t guarantee search rankings, or results like more calls, bookings or sales.
  • No website is perfectly secure or online every minute. We use HTTPS, keep backups and monitor your site, but we can’t promise it will never have a problem.
  • Apart from the promises in these terms and your signed agreement, we make no other promises or guarantees, stated or implied, as far as the law allows.

Limits on liability

  • For all claims about our services or this agreement together, whether for breach of contract, negligence or anything else, the most we’ll pay is what you paid us in the 12 months before the problem began.
  • We’re not responsible for indirect losses, like lost profits, lost sales or harm to your reputation, or for problems caused by services we don’t control, like an outage at our hosting provider or at a platform you use.
  • These limits don’t apply to fraud, to harm we cause on purpose or through gross negligence, to bodily injury, or where the law doesn’t allow them.
  • If someone makes a claim against us because of content or instructions you gave us or approved, like a photo you didn’t have the right to use, you’ll cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it.
  • Neither of us is responsible for delays caused by things outside our reasonable control, like internet or power failures, a platform shutting down, or severe weather. This doesn’t cancel fees already owed.

Confidentiality and privacy

  • We keep private your business information, your logins and anything you share with us in confidence. We use them only to do our work for you, and share them only with the service providers in our privacy policy or when the law requires it.
  • If your site has a contact form, the messages it sends belong to your business. We handle them only to deliver them to you, and never use them for anything else.
  • Our privacy policy explains how we handle personal information.

Changes to these terms

  • The version of these terms in effect when you sign applies to you, until a change applies as described here.
  • We may update these terms. We’ll post the new version here with its date, and email clients at least 30 days before a change applies to them.
  • If a change is worse for you, you can end your agreement before it applies, without paying for the rest of your minimum.
  • Your prices don’t change during your minimum. After that, we may change them with at least 30 days’ notice by email. If you cancel instead, you pay your old price until your plan ends.
  • A change the law requires applies when the law says it does.

Legal details

  • Anything under your agreement, including notice to cancel, must be in writing, and email counts. Send yours to contact@porchlightdev.com. We send ours to the email address in your agreement, so please tell us if it changes.
  • These terms and your agreement are governed by the laws of Alberta and the federal laws of Canada that apply there. The courts of Alberta decide any dispute. Before going to court, we’ll both try to sort it out by talking.
  • If we incorporate or sell our business, we can transfer your agreement to the new company or owner on the same terms, and we’ll tell you. You can transfer yours, for example if you sell your business, with our written OK, which we won’t refuse without a good reason.
  • Together, your signed agreement, these terms and any quotes you accept make up our whole agreement.
  • If a court finds that part of these terms can’t be enforced, the rest still applies. If we don’t enforce a term right away, we can still enforce it later.
  • Parts that are meant to last, like payments owed, ownership and the limits on liability, still apply after your agreement ends.

Using this website

  • The content of this website is ours, or used with permission.
  • Our sample sites are for fictional businesses. Their names, reviews, prices, phone numbers and addresses are made up.
  • The website check gives general guidance based on your own answers. It isn’t a technical audit.
  • Prices on this website can change. The prices in your signed agreement are the ones that apply to you.
  • Links to other websites are there to help you. We’re not responsible for what those sites say.
  • Using this website is governed by the laws of Alberta too.

Questions

Email contact@porchlightdev.com.