Terms & Refunds

Last updated: 21 October 2026

Who this applies to

These terms cover anyone purchasing or subscribing to a service from Whinstone Digital, whether through a Stripe Checkout link on this site or through a signed service agreement. Whinstone Digital is a sole-trader business operated by Alex Smith. Where anything here differs from a service agreement you've actually signed, the signed agreement takes priority for that project — this page is the default that applies otherwise, and a plain-English summary of what's in that agreement.

Support hours

This applies to email, the contact form, and any maintenance or monitoring support requests. Anything urgent flagged outside these windows will still be picked up as soon as possible. For active Maintenance, Marketing, or Security subscriptions, we aim to respond to support requests within 2 working days — a target, not a guaranteed resolution time.

Custom website builds

This covers 3, 5, and 7-page sites, bigger custom platforms, and any other bespoke build. These run on a signed service agreement — what follows is the default that agreement uses, unless yours says otherwise.

• Payment is in three stages, each non-refundable once paid: a 50% deposit before any work begins, a 25% milestone payment once the first round of revisions is delivered back to you, and the final 25% once the last agreed round of revisions is delivered back. Splitting it this way means that if anything goes wrong at the end, only the final quarter is ever at risk — not the whole project.
• Revisions: the price includes 2 rounds of revisions to the initial design/build by default. A round covers changes to what was already agreed — wording, colours, images, spacing. A new page, a new feature, or a structural change to the site isn't a revision; that's additional work, quoted and billed separately at £40/hour, agreed in writing before it starts.
• Your content and feedback: the project depends on you supplying content and feedback when asked. If something we've requested isn't provided within 14 days, the project is paused until it arrives. If a pause runs longer than 21 days, the project may be treated as complete for billing purposes, with any stage already paid retained in full.
• Sign-off: once the final round of revisions is delivered back, you have 10 days to raise any issues in writing. If none are raised, the work is treated as accepted and the final balance becomes due, whether or not formal sign-off has been given. Ownership of the finished site transfers to you once the final balance is paid in full.
• After launch: for 14 days, we'll fix any genuine fault where the site doesn't work as agreed, at no extra charge. New features or content changes after that are billed as new work, not covered by this window.
• Cancelling: if you cancel once work has begun, any stage already paid is retained in full, and any extra work beyond that is billed at £40/hour, payable before files are handed over. If we're ever unable to complete a project ourselves (illness, or the business closing), any part of a paid stage not yet earned by work actually done is refunded.
• After handover: you're responsible for renewing your own domain and hosting once ownership transfers, unless you've agreed a maintenance plan with us to cover this.

Other one-off services

This covers the Website Audit and individual one-off Security Fixes.

• Payment is taken upfront via Stripe Checkout, or by invoice for larger bespoke work.
• If you change your mind before any work has started, you're entitled to a full refund — just email us.
• Once work has started (a report is being compiled, or a fix is being applied), refunds are considered case by case, since the time and effort involved has already begun. We'll always try to be fair about this rather than rigid.

Subscriptions

This covers Website Maintenance, Security Monitoring, and Marketing Retainers (all billed monthly).

• Subscriptions are billed monthly in advance via Stripe, starting from the date you subscribe.
• Maintenance and Security run month-to-month; either side can cancel with 30 days' written notice. Marketing and the AI Chat Assistant each carry a 3-month minimum term (rankings, review counts, ad accounts and a chat assistant's knowledge all need a settling-in period), after which they also roll month-to-month with 30 days' notice.
• If a Marketing Retainer is cancelled before that 3-month minimum term ends, the fees for the remaining months become due immediately, reflecting the setup and account work already committed to cover the full term.
• Any ad, analytics, or social media accounts used to deliver a Marketing service (Google Ads, GA4, your own social profiles) always remain yours — our access is removed once the agreement ends.
• We may increase a subscription's price with at least 30 days' written notice, never taking effect before any minimum term you're still inside has ended. If you don't want to continue at the new price, you can cancel from the date it would take effect instead of the usual notice period.
• We don't offer partial refunds for the unused part of a billing period once it's begun.
• Website Maintenance is only available for Whinstone-built sites, or any other site once it's been through a paid audit and any flagged fixes have been completed first — this is explained on the Maintenance service itself.

What Security services are, and aren't

Security Monitoring and the one-off Security Fixes are hardening and monitoring using trustworthy, low-cost tools and good practice — they are not penetration testing, a formal compliance audit (such as PCI-DSS or ISO 27001), or a certified security assessment. This reduces risk, but it can't guarantee a site will never be hacked, breached, or taken offline by a third party — our responsibility is to monitor for and respond to issues, not to prevent every possible incident. If your business needs a certified assessment specifically, we're happy to point you toward a specialist, but it isn't what's being sold here.

Ownership, content, and what we can reuse

• You're responsible for making sure any content you supply us (text, images, logos, video, testimonials) doesn't infringe anyone else's rights and isn't defamatory, unlawful, or misleading.
• In turn, we warrant that, to the best of our knowledge, the elements we create specifically for you don't knowingly infringe anyone else's intellectual property rights.
• We may display finished work in our portfolio or as a case study unless you ask us not to. Stock photos, fonts, icons, or third-party plugins we use stay under their own licences and aren't owned outright by either of us, and we keep the right to reuse our own general know-how, code, and pre-existing tools.

Liability, confidentiality, and other important limits

• Our liability for any claim is capped at the total fees you've paid for the relevant service — except for anything the law says can never be capped, such as death or personal injury caused by negligence, or fraud.
• We don't guarantee specific results — rankings, traffic, sales, leads, or ad performance — as these depend on factors outside our control.
• Anything non-public shared between us (business plans, pricing, login details, drafts) is kept confidential by both sides.
• Where a project involves collecting or storing personal data from your own customers (a contact form, a mailing list), you're responsible for your own compliance with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, including having a privacy policy in place.
• Neither of us is liable for delays caused by circumstances beyond our reasonable control (illness, outages, third-party platform failures); if that continues for more than 60 days, either side can end the affected agreement without penalty.
• We rely on third-party services (hosting, payment processing, domain registration) and aren't responsible for their outages or policy changes, though we'll help resolve any impact where we reasonably can.
• We may bring in a subcontractor to help deliver part of the work, while staying fully responsible for the result and for keeping your information confidential.
• We're not currently VAT-registered, so prices on this site and in our agreements don't include VAT.
• If you ever have a concern about our work or an agreement, we'd ask that you raise it with us directly first, so we have a fair chance to put it right before it becomes a public review — this doesn't limit your right to leave honest feedback once you've given us that chance.

Late payment

For invoiced work (as opposed to Stripe Checkout purchases), payment terms are as stated on the invoice. Late payment may be subject to statutory interest and compensation under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, consistent with the terms in our standard service agreement.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the business grows — the date at the top will always show when it was last changed. Continuing to use an active subscription after a change means you accept the updated terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

Questions

If anything here isn't clear, email WhinstoneDigital@gmail.com before purchasing — always happy to explain.