Who owns my website?

Under our Terms of Service, the Deliverables are the websites, software, content and configurations we create specifically for you under a Quote. On full payment, those Deliverables are licensed or assigned to you as your Quote sets out. Unless the Quote says the rights are assigned, you receive a non-exclusive licence to use them for your own business purposes, or an exclusive licence where the Quote says so. Until payment is made in full, any licence is conditional and may be withheld.

The practical point sits in that sentence: the Quote is the document that decides how much you own. If outright ownership of what we build matters to you, ask for an assignment in your Quote before work starts. A signed Quote prevails over the standard terms for that piece of work, so this is a real lever, not small print.

We retain all rights in our background intellectual property: our tooling, our methodologies, our libraries and our general know-how, including anything we develop or reuse across clients. That is standard across the industry, because no builder can sign away the tools it uses for every client. Third-party and open-source components included in your site also remain subject to their own licences, which is true of virtually every modern website whoever builds it.

One honest caveat from the same section of the terms: the licence or assignment you receive is given without any warranty of non-infringement or originality in respect of AI-assisted output, beyond our obligation to perform the services with reasonable care and skill. We cover what that means in practice in our answer on AI-written content and originality.

Your content is the clearest part of the whole answer. The text, images, logos, video, data and product information you provide stay yours. You grant us a non-exclusive licence to use them for the purpose of delivering the services, and that purpose limitation is the whole of what we take.

Domain names sit outside the terms almost entirely. What the terms do say is that domain registration is a third-party charge you are responsible for, and that third-party platforms are governed by their own terms, which is how domains actually work: the registrar's agreement governs the domain. In practice, keeping the registration in your own name and your own registrar account keeps control of the domain with you, and that is what we would suggest whoever builds your site.

Cancelling the monthly plan ends the services that fee pays for: hosting, monitoring and changes stop. The licence you received on full payment is dealt with by the intellectual property terms of your own agreement; the terms that survive termination include those on intellectual property.

On termination you may ask us to export or return a copy of the content and data we hold for you, in a reasonable format and within a reasonable period, and we may charge a fair amount for non-trivial export work. After a reasonable retention window we may delete data held for you, and the terms make you responsible for keeping your own copies of anything you need to retain, so retrieve what you need in good time. The standard terms do not spell out a full handover of a working site to another developer, so if portability matters to you, raise it before you sign and we will deal with it in your Quote. Ask us directly and you will get a straight answer.