Terms of engagement.

Which Involve Digital company you are contracting with depends on where you are, and it is decided by the currency you are quoted in:

• Priced in Australian dollars — your agreement is with Involve Digital Pty Ltd (ABN 84 165 142 996), Suite 526, 368 Sussex Street, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia, governed by the laws of New South Wales, Australia.
• Priced in any other currency — your agreement is with Involve Digital Limited (NZBN 9429046270870), governed by the laws of New Zealand. This is the New Zealand company; there is a separate British company of the same name, and the NZBN above is how you tell them apart.

Most agencies ask a small business for eight to twenty thousand dollars up front to build a website, then bill again every month to market it. That is the reason a lot of good operators never get a proper website at all — the money simply is not there at the start, which is exactly when it is needed most.

We do it the other way around. We carry the build cost ourselves and you pay a monthly subscription. That only works if we are both in it for the long haul, so that is what this agreement is built around: we invest in an asset for your business up front, and we earn it back by looking after it well enough that you want to stay.

It means our incentives point the same way. We do not get paid more by building you something quickly and walking away. We get paid when your website keeps working, keeps ranking and keeps bringing you work, year after year.

Your card is charged when you subscribe, so the money side is already done. What we still need is the brief.

We begin building once you have completed the onboarding questionnaire — we cannot write your content or structure your site without it. We will chase you for it, because the build cannot start until it lands and we would rather you had the site than the credit.

If you change your mind within 14 days of subscribing and we have not started building, tell us and we will refund you in full and cancel the subscription. No reason needed and no argument.

"Started building" has a clean test: it means your onboarding questionnaire is in and we have begun work on it. Before that there is nothing to unwind. After that, the ordinary cancellation terms below apply — 30 days' notice, and nothing further to pay.

This sits on top of any refund or cancellation rights you already have by law, and does not replace them.

Your subscription is billed monthly in advance to the card you save at checkout, on the anniversary of the day you subscribed. Prices are quoted excluding tax.

Tax follows whichever company you are contracting with. Australian customers are charged 10% GST by the Australian company, which is registered for it. New Zealand customers are charged 15% GST by the New Zealand company, which is registered for it. Everywhere else, no GST is added — you may still have tax obligations of your own where you are, and those are yours to handle.

Google Ads spend, if you add managed ads, is separate from the management fee and is paid to Google, not to us. The management fee covers building and running the campaigns; the ad spend is your budget and you keep control of it.

If a payment fails we will tell you and try again. If it keeps failing we pause the work and get in touch — we will not quietly keep working and send you a surprise bill, and we will not cut you off without talking to you first.

The monthly fee is not a payment plan for the website. It buys ongoing work, every month, for as long as you subscribe:

• Hosting, security, monitoring and backups.
• Maintenance and updates, so the site does not rot the way an unattended site does.
• Performance — we keep the site fast and hold it to a Core Web Vitals standard, because slow sites lose work.
• The search work in your plan: new pages, Google Business Profile, schema markup, reporting.
• Practical help when your business needs the site to do something — a seasonal promotion, a new service, a landing page for a campaign.

This is the clause to read slowly, because it is the one people most often assume says something it does not.

At onboarding we agree a list of target searches with you, in writing — the specific things your customers actually type, like a service and a suburb rather than a single broad word. Those searches are what our monthly search work aims at, and we will tell you honestly which of them we think are winnable and which are not.

Specific local searches of that kind are usually winnable, and often within the first couple of months. Broad, one-word, national terms are not, and they are not what your customers type anyway.

What we commit to is the work: building the site properly, keeping it fast and online, and doing the search work set out in your plan every month, aimed at the searches we agreed.

What we do not promise is a position. We do not guarantee first-page rankings, a specific position for a specific search, a number of enquiries, or an amount of income. Nobody honestly can — Google is not ours to control, and neither is your market or your competitors.

What we can tell you is what has actually happened for operators we have set up, and we will show you real numbers rather than averages. Treat those as evidence that the approach works, not as a promise about your business. We would rather tell you that now than have you find out later.

You own your business. You own your content — the words, the photos you supply, your logo and brand. You own your domain name: we register it in your name, not ours, and it stays yours whatever happens between us. You own your Google Business Profile and your customer enquiries and data.

We own the website codebase, the design system it is built on, and the Involve Digital tooling behind it, for as long as you are subscribing. You are licensed to use all of it, exclusively for your business, for as long as your subscription is current. If you buy the site outright, ownership of the code for your site transfers to you.

We never hold your website or your data to ransom. If you leave, you take your content, your enquiry records, your domain and a free static copy of the site with you, whether or not you buy the source code.

You can cancel at any time by telling us in writing. Your subscription ends 30 days later. You pay for that final month and nothing more — there is no exit fee, no penalty, and no minimum term you have to see out.

What happens to the website itself is the part worth reading carefully before you subscribe. You will not be left with nothing — you always get your content, your domain and a static copy — but the live, maintained, still-improving site is part of the subscription and it stops when the subscription does.

Because the live website is part of the service rather than something you bought, it does not simply carry on once the subscription stops. You have three choices, and they are all genuinely open to you:

• Buy the website outright. Pay the buy-out price and the source code becomes yours: we hand it over and help you move it to a host of your choosing. You or any developer can keep building on it. You are then responsible for hosting, maintaining, updating and marketing it yourself.
• Take the static copy. Pay nothing further. At the end of your notice period we export all your content and give you a static copy of the site as it stands, free, to host wherever you like. We then stop hosting the live version.
• Stay. Keep the subscription running and everything carries on as it is.

We will never hold your website to ransom, and the static copy is how we make sure of that. It costs you nothing and you get it whether or not you buy the source code.

Be clear about what it is, though, so it is not a surprise later. A static copy is a snapshot of your site on the day you leave: a set of files that look and read exactly like your website and can be put on almost any host. Every page you had is in there, and so is all your content.

What it is not is a website that can keep growing. It is not the source code, so it cannot be edited the way we edit it, new pages cannot be added the way we add them, and the parts that update themselves stop updating. It receives no maintenance, no security patches, no performance work and no search work from us. It will not get worse overnight, but it will slowly age, and anything you want changed will need a developer.

If you want a site that can keep being developed, that is what buying the source code gives you.

The buy-out price is 12,000 for a Starter build and 18,000 for a Growth build, in the currency you are billed in, plus any applicable tax. So an Australian client pays A$12,000 or A$18,000, a UK client £12,000 or £18,000, and so on.

That is not a charge for leaving — you can leave for free at any time and take the static copy with you. It is the price of purchasing the source code outright: an asset you have been using rather than buying. It reflects what commissioning the same website would cost, because it is the same thing — custom design rather than a template, hand-built for speed, copywriting across the full site, schema markup throughout, Google Business Profile and conversion tracking configured, and the performance work behind the standard we hold it to.

The price does not reduce over time, and it is fair that it does not. Your monthly subscription has not been quietly paying the website off — every dollar of it has gone on the hosting, maintenance, performance work, new pages and search work you received that month. The website is the part we funded up front and have carried ever since.

You can buy at any time, not only when cancelling.

What you get: the full source code for your website — not the static snapshot — along with your content and a hand-over to a host of your choosing.

What is not included: any third-party licensed material we cannot legally transfer, such as stock photography and fonts licensed to us. We will tell you which items these are and either replace them or arrange a licence you can hold yourself, at cost. Also excluded is the wider Involve Digital platform, our internal tooling and our AI systems, none of which are specific to your site.

Once you own it, we are not responsible for hosting it, maintaining it, updating it, or its performance or search rankings.

We will not delete anything the moment your notice period ends. You get 30 days after your final day of service to change your mind or buy the source code, and we will get your content export and your static copy to you inside that window.

After that window the live site and its hosting are decommissioned. Your domain remains yours regardless, and we will point it wherever you ask — including at your static copy, once you have it hosted.

The build only moves as fast as the information we have. We need your onboarding questionnaire, your content and any photos, access to your Google Business Profile where relevant, and reasonable responsiveness when we ask you something — a build typically stalls on an unanswered question, not on our end.

You are responsible for the accuracy of what you tell us to publish: your pricing, your service area, your qualifications, your licence numbers and any claims about your work. We will not publish anything we believe is misleading, and we may decline to publish something rather than put your business at risk.

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law (if you contracted with the Australian company) or the New Zealand Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 and Fair Trading Act 1986 (if you contracted with the New Zealand one), or any other law that cannot be excluded by agreement.

Where we are permitted to limit our liability, we limit it to re-supplying the service or paying the cost of having it re-supplied. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profits or business — but that limit does not apply where the law says it cannot.

These terms are versioned, and the version you accepted at checkout is recorded with your payment. That version is the one that applies to you.

If we change them, we will tell you at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and you are free to cancel within that period if you do not accept it. We will not change the price of your subscription, or what it includes, without that same notice and the same right to walk away.