Terms of service

These terms cover use of the northstackhub.com website and any engagement with NorthStackHub that is not already governed by a signed agreement. When we sign a statement of work, a master services agreement or a marketplace order, that document takes precedence over anything here that conflicts with it.

Work booked through a freelance marketplace such as Upwork is additionally subject to that platform’s own terms, including how funds are held in escrow and how disputes are resolved.

We design, build, deploy and maintain web applications: frontends, backends, APIs, databases and caching layers, payment integrations, cloud infrastructure and ongoing support. Exactly what we are doing for you is set out in the written scope we send before work begins.

Anything not written into that scope is not included. That is not a technicality — it is what makes a fixed price possible, and it protects you as much as it protects us.

We do not provide legal, tax, accounting, medical or financial advice, and nothing we build should be treated as a substitute for professional advice in those fields. Regulatory compliance for your product — accessibility standards, payment rules, data protection obligations, industry licensing — remains your responsibility, though we will build to any specific requirement you give us.

Fixed-price quotes are valid for 30 days and are calculated against a specific written scope and a specific set of assumptions. Both appear in the quote so you can see what we priced.

Scope changes. When you ask for something outside the agreed scope — a new feature, a redesign of something already approved, an extra integration, a third round of revisions where two were agreed — we quote it as a separate change request with its own price and schedule impact. Nothing is built and nothing is invoiced until you approve that change request in writing. Email counts as writing.

If an assumption in the quote turns out to be wrong — an API is not what its documentation claimed, a legacy database is in worse shape than described — we tell you as soon as we know, with options and costs, rather than absorbing it silently and cutting corners elsewhere.

• Fixed-price projects: 40% to book the slot and start, the balance across agreed milestones, with the final milestone due on delivery.
• Retainers: invoiced monthly in advance; unused hours do not roll over unless the retainer says they do.
• Audits and day-rate work: invoiced on completion, or monthly for anything running longer than a month.
• Marketplace orders: paid through the platform's own escrow and milestone system.

Invoices are due within 14 days unless we agree otherwise in writing. Prices are quoted in US dollars and exclude any taxes, duties or withholdings that apply where you are; bank and payment processor fees are yours.

Deposits reserve capacity in our schedule and are non-refundable once work has started. If an invoice is more than 14 days overdue we may pause work and hold deliverables until it is settled, after giving you notice. We would much rather talk about a cash flow problem than stop a project over one.

Projects stall for predictable reasons, and almost all of them are about access and answers. To keep to a timeline we need feedback and approvals within five business days, timely access to accounts, repositories, content and third-party systems, and one named person who can make decisions.

Where delays on your side push the schedule, dates move accordingly and we will tell you at the time rather than at the end. You confirm that any content, data or assets you give us are yours to use.

On receipt of final payment, all intellectual property rights in the deliverables we built specifically for you — source code, designs, documentation and configuration — transfer to you outright. You own them. There is no licence to renew and no proprietary framework holding your project hostage.

Two things sit outside that transfer. First, our pre-existing tools, libraries, internal boilerplate and general know-how remain ours; where any of it is embedded in your deliverables you receive a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use, modify and sublicense it as part of the project. Second, open-source components stay under their own licences, all of which we will have chosen to be compatible with commercial use.

Until final payment clears, we retain ownership of the deliverables. We may describe the work publicly and show non-confidential screenshots in our portfolio unless you ask us not to — say the word and we will keep the engagement private.

Most projects depend on services we do not control: cloud hosting, payment processors, email and SMS providers, authentication, mapping, analytics, and various APIs. You contract with those providers directly, you pay their fees, and you accept their terms.

We will recommend sensible options, integrate them properly and document the setup, but we are not responsible for their outages, pricing changes, deprecations, account suspensions or breaking API changes. Where such a change requires rework after delivery, it is chargeable — quoted first, as always.

Every project carries a 30-day warranty from the date of delivery. If something we built does not work as specified in the agreed scope, we fix it at no charge, and we treat that as a priority rather than a favour.

The warranty does not cover:

• New features or changes of mind — those are change requests.
• Faults caused by changes other people made to the code or infrastructure after handover.
• Breakages caused by third-party services changing their behaviour, pricing or APIs.
• Content, data or configuration errors introduced on your side.
• Hosting, domain or subscription costs.

Beyond that period, ongoing cover is available on a maintenance retainer. Otherwise the work is provided as is, without further warranties of any kind, express or implied, to the fullest extent the law allows.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or connected to an engagement is limited to the total fees you paid us for that engagement in the 6 months before the claim arose.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, including lost profits, lost revenue, lost or corrupted data, business interruption, or loss of goodwill, even if we were told such losses were possible.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer rather than a business, your statutory rights are unaffected.

Backups are your responsibility unless a written agreement says we manage them. We will always help you set them up properly.

Anything you share with us that is marked confidential, or that a reasonable person would treat as confidential — business plans, roadmaps, customer lists, credentials, unreleased products, financials — stays confidential. We use it only to do your work and disclose it only to the people on your project, who are under the same obligation.

This lasts for the engagement and for 3 years afterwards, and it runs both ways: we expect the same treatment of our proposals, estimates and internal methods. It does not apply to information that is already public, that you tell us is not confidential, or that we are legally compelled to disclose — and in that last case we will tell you first where we are allowed to.

We are happy to sign your NDA before a discovery call. Just send it over.

Either of us can end an engagement with 14 days’ written notice. Retainers can be cancelled with 30 days’ notice, effective at the end of the current billing month.

On termination you pay for all work completed and in progress up to the effective date, and once that is settled we hand over everything produced so far, transfer the relevant IP under the terms above, return or destroy your confidential material, and give you a written summary of where things stand so another team can pick it up.

Either of us may terminate immediately if the other commits a material breach and fails to fix it within 14 days of being told about it. We reserve the right to decline or withdraw from work that is illegal, or that we consider unethical or abusive.

Neither of us is liable for delays caused by events genuinely outside our control. If any clause here is held unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. A failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it. Neither party may assign these terms without the other’s written consent, except as part of a sale of the business.

We may update these terms; the version published on the day your engagement starts is the one that governs it. Disputes are handled first by a conversation, then by mediation, and only then by the courts of the jurisdiction named in your signed agreement.

Questions about these terms, and anything to do with quotes, scopes and contracts, go to info@northstackhub.com. Hyderabad, India · Working remotely with clients worldwide.