How we work, written down.

Two documents, in that order. These terms cover the site and the enquiry you send us. If you become a client, the written proposal for your build — the scope, the phases, the price, the dates — governs the work. Where the two disagree, your proposal wins.

Reading the site commits you to nothing. Nothing here is a binding offer, and sending the form doesn't start a project. The price guidance on the homepage exists so you can tell early whether we are in the right range for you. The real number comes from a written quote against a defined scope.

The demo is invented, deliberately. Meridian Supply Co. is a company we made up so you could click through a whole working system without waiting for a client's permission. Every order, invoice and figure in it is fictional. It's there for you to judge the work, not to stand in for a real business.

Using this site. Read it, share it, quote it. Don't attack it, scrape it wholesale, or try to reach parts of it that ask you to sign in. The words and drawings on it are ours; the ideas in it are yours to use in your own business.

Build work goes out in phases, each quoted on its own. We scope a phase, write down what it includes, and give you a fixed price for it. You approve the scope and the price in writing before work starts. Nothing is metered by the hour behind your back.

A phase has edges, and we say where they are. If something comes up mid-phase that is genuinely outside what was agreed, we tell you at the time. It is then priced as its own small piece of work or folded into the next phase. We don't build first and invoice afterwards.

A quote holds for a defined scope. If the scope changes materially — a new requirement, a different integration, a part of the operation nobody mentioned in the survey — the quote is revised and re-agreed before we continue.

We may say the work is not for us. This is a small studio on purpose. We keep a limited number of clients at a time so each system gets real attention, which means we sometimes decline work, or tell you a first phase is the wrong one. We'd rather do that than take money for a build we can't do properly.

Build phases. Quoted individually before work starts, and invoiced against the schedule set out in your proposal. A fixed price for a fixed scope, with any change agreed in writing first.

Monthly operation. Invoiced monthly for as long as we are running the system. The amount depends on the system and how much it changes, and it is agreed in writing before it begins. If the shape of the work changes materially we come and talk to you about it — it doesn't drift upwards quietly.

Third-party costs. Hosting, domains, email delivery, payment processing and similar services are billed by those providers or passed through at cost. We'll tell you what they are before you commit to them, and we don't mark them up.

If an invoice goes unpaid. We talk to you first. We don't lock a business out of its own software as a collection tactic and we won't hold your data hostage. We also can't run a system indefinitely for nothing, so if it comes to that, we agree an orderly handover instead of a switch being flipped.

We don't promise perfect software. Nobody honest does. What we aim for is a system that is up, correct, and quick to put right when it is not — and we would rather be judged on how fast the third one happens than on a percentage in a clause.

Some of it is not ours to promise. Your system runs on Cloudflare and usually talks to other companies' services for payment, email, mapping, or whatever else your operation needs. When one of those has an outage we work around it and keep you informed, but we don't control it and can't warrant it.

Support hours. The reporting button works at any hour, and we usually answer enquiries and reports within one business day. If something is genuinely stopping your business from operating, call rather than write.

Where liability lands. Nothing here limits anything the law does not allow us to limit. Beyond that: our responsibility for a piece of work is tied to the fees for that work, and neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential losses such as lost profit. If that paragraph ever has to be argued over, both of us have already failed. We'd much rather fix the thing.

Backups and continuity. Your system inherits the durability of the platform it runs on, and we keep your code in a repository you control. Ask us what the recovery position is for your specific system and we will tell you plainly rather than gesture at the word "enterprise".