Terms of service

1.What we are agreeing to

Our agreement is made up of two documents: the quote I send you, and this page. The quote describes your project — what I am building, what it costs, when it is paid and what is excluded. This page covers everything that only matters if something goes wrong.

Where the quote and this page disagree, the quote wins. It was written for your project; this page was not.

The quote names a version of these terms and the date it carried. That version is the one that applies to your build, whatever appears here later.

2.Scope

The scope of the work is what the quote says it is. I will build that, and I will not quietly build less.

Anything outside it is quoted separately, and I will always give you the figure before I start on it. If you ask for something mid-build and it is genuinely small, I will usually just do it — but nothing large arrives on your invoice as a surprise.

3.What I need from you

Most builds depend on accounts that have to be in your name — the Apple Developer Program, Google Play, and whichever cloud services your project uses. I cannot create those for you, because they are yours and they hold your billing details.

The schedule in your quote runs from the point at which I have what I need: the answers to any open questions, access to those accounts, and any content or brand assets the quote lists. If that arrives late, the delivery date moves by roughly the same amount. I will tell you when it does rather than let a date quietly slip.

4.Review and acceptance

When the build is ready I will put it on your own device and you review it properly. You then send me one consolidated list of changes, within the window the quote gives.

I work through that list. Anything on it that is within the agreed scope is fixed at no extra cost; anything that is a new requirement is quoted separately, and I will say which is which rather than silently absorbing or silently charging.

If the review window passes without a list from you, the build is treated as accepted. That is not a trap to catch you out — it is so that a project has an end, and so that neither of us is left wondering months later whether it was finished.

5.Payment

Payment is split as the quote sets out, normally half on acceptance of the quote and half on delivery. Both are taken by card through a Stripe checkout link that I send you.

The final payment falls due when the build has been delivered and accepted — not when the app stores approve it. Store review is a queue I do not control and cannot hurry, and it would not be reasonable for my invoice to sit behind it. I still handle the submissions, and I still see them through.

The deposit confirms your slot in the schedule. I take a small number of builds at a time, so accepting yours means declining someone else's.

6.Tax

I am based in the Canary Islands, which sits outside the European VAT area and applies its own indirect tax, IGIC, in place of VAT. Where it applies, IGIC is added to the fee and shown on the invoice. The general IGIC rate is considerably lower than mainland Spanish or other European VAT.

For a business customer outside the European Union, the supply may fall outside the scope of the tax altogether. I will confirm the position that applies to you before invoicing, and your quote will say which it is.

7.Services I do not control

Your app depends on services run by other companies — Apple, Google, and whichever database, hosting and email providers the project uses. I choose them carefully, and they are all services I use myself, but I do not control them.

If a store rejects a submission for something I can fix, I fix it and resubmit at no charge. That is part of the job. If a store changes its policies after your app is live and the app needs reworking to comply, that is new work and is quoted as such.

An outage, a price change or a discontinued service at one of those providers is not a defect in the work I delivered, and their fees are yours rather than mine.

8.Who owns what

On final payment, the application I build for you is yours: the source code, the accounts, the keys and the store listings. There is no licence to renew and no continuing dependency on me. You can take it to any other developer, and I will not make that difficult.

One necessary exception. I build on my own tooling, templates and libraries, developed over years and used across every project. Those remain mine. You receive a permanent, irrevocable right to use, change and distribute them as part of your application, for as long as you like, at no further cost — so nothing about your ownership of your app is conditional. What you cannot do is take that tooling out and sell or distribute it as a template or starter kit in its own right. Applications built with it are an entirely different thing.

Until final payment is made, the work stays mine and is provided to you for review only.

9.Confidentiality

I will not share your product plans, your specification, your data or your commercial arrangements with anyone. This holds after the project ends, and it is not limited in time.

It does not cover anything already public, anything you publish yourself, or anything I am legally required to disclose.

10.Data protection

Your application's users are your responsibility. In data protection terms you are the controller and I am acting on your instructions during the build.

I build against test data. I do not copy your users' personal data onto my own machine, and I do not need to. Where a project requires me to hold credentials for your services, they are kept in encrypted storage and handed over or destroyed when the project ends.

Once the handover is complete I hold nothing of yours and my access to your accounts ends.

11.Defects

If something within the agreed scope does not work as it should, tell me and I will fix it at no charge, for thirty days after acceptance. That is a real commitment and I would rather you used it than lived with a bug.

It covers defects in what I built. It does not cover new features, changes you have decided you want, problems caused by changes someone else made after handover, or failures in third-party services.

12.Limits on my liability

My total liability under our agreement is limited to the fees you have paid me for the project. This limit is also stated in your quote, because it is important enough that it should not be something you discover only by following a link.

I am not liable for indirect or consequential losses — lost profit, lost revenue, lost data, or business interruption — arising from the work or from your use of the application.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Software of any size contains defects. I test what I build and I stand behind it, but I cannot warrant that an application will be free of them, and no honest developer will tell you otherwise.

13.If either of us wants to stop

You can end the project at any time by telling me. The deposit is not refundable, because it bought a place in the schedule that I turned other work away to hold. Anything you have already paid for beyond that is delivered to you in whatever state it has reached.

I can end the project if the fees go unpaid, or if I am left without something I need to continue for an unreasonable length of time. I would raise it with you well before it came to that.

14.Talking about the work

I would like to be able to say that I built your app, and to show it in a portfolio or write about how it was made. If you would rather I did not, tell me and I will not — before, during or after the project, without needing a reason.

I will never publish your data, your users, your revenue or anything you have told me in confidence.

15.After handover

Maintenance is not included. When the handover is complete, the engagement is complete and the application is yours to run.

If you would rather keep me reachable, a Studio membership does that on a monthly basis and can be cancelled at any time. It is optional, and nothing about your app depends on it. A membership is a separate product governed by its own terms at academy.kealy.studio/terms, not by this page.

16.Changes to these terms

I may update this page for future projects. A later version never applies to a build already quoted or under way — yours is governed by the version and date named in your quote, and I keep a dated record of every version.

If I need to change anything about a project already agreed, that is a conversation with you, not an edit to a web page.

17.Law

Our agreement is governed by Spanish law, and the Spanish courts have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it.

I would far rather resolve anything by talking to you first, and in practice that is how it has always gone.