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Terms and Conditions

SI Studios | Last updated: November 12, 2026

These terms apply when you buy website design, website build, custom program or website management services from us. Please read them before you pay a deposit. Section 7 explains that your deposit is non-refundable.

1. Who we are

"SI Studios", "we" and "us" means the New Zealand sole trader named in the business details at the end of these terms, trading as SI Studios. You can reach us at [email protected].

"You" means the business that buys from us, and the person accepting these terms confirms they have authority to bind that business.

What we offer. We create websites (including online stores) and custom programs, such as web-based tools, dashboards and automations, and we offer ongoing website management and advertising. We do not create mobile apps for app stores, and nothing in a Quote should be read as including one.

2. Business customers only

Our services are for businesses. By accepting these terms you confirm you are buying in trade, for the purposes of your business, and not for personal, domestic or household use.

Because you are buying in trade, you and we agree that it is fair and reasonable that:

• the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 (New Zealand) does not apply; and
• sections 9, 12A, 13 and 14(1) of the Fair Trading Act 1986 (New Zealand) do not apply between us, so far as the law allows.

If you are based in the United States, you confirm you are buying as a business and not as a consumer. To the extent the law allows, all implied warranties are excluded, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. Our only promises are those set out in section 17.

Nothing in these terms removes any right that the law of your location says cannot be excluded.

3. How our agreement is formed

Our agreement starts when both of these have happened:

• you accept these terms, by ticking the box at payment, signing, or confirming by email; and
• you pay your deposit, or we confirm in writing that work can begin.

Our agreement is made up of your written Quote, your written Scope (if separate from the Quote) and these terms. If they conflict, the Quote and Scope apply first.

4. Prices and Quotes

• Every website is different, so we do not publish fixed prices. Your price depends on the website you want.
• Your price and what it includes are set out in your written Quote, given after a call. It is confirmed before design work begins.
• A Quote is valid for 30 days unless it says otherwise.

5. Payment

• Prices are in US dollars unless the Quote says otherwise.
• Unless your Quote says otherwise, you pay 35% as a deposit to start, and the remaining 65% before handover. The deposit is paid only after your call.
• We accept card payments through our payment provider, and bank transfer.
• You are responsible for any bank, currency conversion or international transfer fees charged by your own provider.
• Prices do not include any taxes that apply to you. If we must charge a tax by law, we will show it on your invoice.
• Domain, hosting, third-party software, stock material and advertising costs are not included unless your Quote says so. These are paid by you, in your own accounts.

6. Late payment

If an invoice is more than 7 days overdue, we may pause work until it is paid, and the timeline will move accordingly. We do not release final files or complete handover until all amounts due have been paid.

On amounts more than 14 days overdue we may charge interest at 20% a year (or, if lower, the highest rate the law where you are based allows), calculated daily from the due date until paid, together with reasonable costs of recovering the debt, including debt collection and legal costs. Under a retainer, we may also pause the retainer services until the account is up to date.

Payment disputes. If you dispute a card payment with your bank without first contacting us to resolve it, that is a breach of these terms, and we may pause all work until the dispute is resolved.

7. Your deposit

Except as set out in this section, your deposit is non-refundable. It secures your place in our schedule and pays for the early work on your project, including reviewing your business, planning and starting design. Because we set aside time and turn down other work once you have paid, the deposit is not returned if you change your mind or cancel.

Your deposit counts toward your final price.

We only take your deposit after your call, once you have your Quote and choose to go ahead. Nothing is paid before the call.

We will refund your deposit if:

• we decide not to take on your project or cannot provide the services, and you have not breached these terms; or
• the law requires a refund.

If you are unhappy with a charge, please contact us first so that we can try to resolve it. Records of your acceptance of these terms, your Quote and our work may be provided to your card issuer if a payment is disputed.

8. Scope and changes

• We will build what is described in your Quote and Scope.
• Two rounds of changes are included, unless your Quote says otherwise. A round is one combined list of changes that you send us at one time, within the agreed Scope.
• Please send each round within 10 business days of receiving our work.
• Further rounds, new pages, new features or a change in direction are outside the Scope. We will quote for these and get your approval before doing the extra work.

9. Timelines

Your timeline is agreed on your call and confirmed in writing. Dates are good-faith estimates, and they depend on you providing what we need on time.

If we are waiting on you for more than 30 days, we may pause your project. If we have not heard from you for 90 days after giving you written notice, we may close the project. In that case your deposit is kept, any completed work that remains unpaid may be invoiced under section 16, and restarting may need a new Quote.

10. What you need to provide

You agree to:

• give us accurate information about your business;
• provide content that you own or have permission to use, including photos, logos, reviews and text;
• give us only real reviews, figures, licences and claims. We will not publish invented or misleading material, and we may refuse or remove content that appears unlawful, false or misleading;
• respond to our questions and approvals within a reasonable time; and
• hold your domain, hosting and other accounts in your own name, and set up any access that handover requires.

You are responsible for the content you supply and for your website meeting the laws that apply to your business. That includes your own privacy policy, terms of sale, trade licensing and advertising claims, and for an online store your payments, tax, shipping and refunds. We do not give legal, tax or financial advice.

11. Approval

All projects are checked and confirmed by the customer before delivery and before final payment.

We will show you your website before it goes live. Nothing goes live until you approve it. Approval can be given by email or message.

If we ask for your approval or feedback and do not hear from you within 15 business days, we will send a written reminder. If there is still no reply 5 business days after that reminder, we may treat that stage as complete for scheduling and invoicing. Your website still does not go live without your approval.

Your approval confirms you have checked the content, spelling, prices, contact details and claims on your website. Mistakes in approved content that you find later are corrected as a change request under section 8.

12. Final payment and delivery

After approval and final payment, we will deliver your website using the option in your Quote:

• Download: you receive the full website files and host them yourself.
• Handover: we set your website up on hosting and a domain in your own accounts, then remove our access.
• Managed: the same as Handover, except that we keep only the access you choose to give us for the Management Retainer in section 14.

You also receive a plain guide to making simple changes and a list of licences for third-party materials.

Once your website has been handed over, it is yours. Unless you have a Management Retainer, it is yours to run. We are not responsible for changes made by you or others after handover, or for problems caused by those changes, your hosting or third-party services.

13. Ownership

Copyright. Our work is protected by copyright, and all rights are reserved by SI Studios. This includes our designs, wording, code, visual effects, concept and demonstration sites, and images we create, to the extent the law protects them. Our work may not be copied, reused, resold or adapted by anyone unless they have bought it from us and can show proof of sale, such as a paid invoice or receipt from SI Studios. Without proof of sale, no licence or permission is given. Once a customer has paid in full, the rights in their finished website pass to them as set out below. Stock photographs, fonts, open-source code and other third-party materials belong to their owners and are used under their licences; customers' own content remains theirs.

Before final payment, we keep all rights in our work. You may review it only for the purposes of giving feedback and approval.

After we receive full payment, we transfer to you all intellectual property rights that we hold in the finished website created for you. This takes effect automatically on payment in full.

This does not include:

• Third-party materials, such as open-source code, fonts and licensed images. These stay under their own licences, which are listed at handover and which you must follow.
• Your content, which remains yours. You allow us to use it to carry out your project.
• Our tools and know-how. We keep our internal systems, methods, unused concepts and general skills and techniques. Nothing we hand over gives you rights to them, beyond what is contained in your finished website.

Some materials may not be capable of copyright protection in every country, and common design techniques and code patterns are not exclusive to anyone. We do not promise otherwise. Concept and demonstration sites are examples only and are not transferred to you.

Images. Images on your website may be licensed stock or generated by us using AI image tools licensed for commercial use. Licences are listed at handover. Generated images are made new for your project and are not photographs of your real work unless we say so; you agree not to present them as photos of real jobs.

Concept sites. Concept and demonstration sites shown by SI Studios are examples of our design work. They are not customers' websites, and they do not suggest that any business named or pictured in them is our customer.

Our portfolio. Once your website is live, we may show it, screenshots and recordings of it, and a short description of the project in our portfolio, social media and marketing, and include a small "Site by SI Studios" credit in the footer. We never show your confidential information. If you would rather we did not, tell us in writing and we will stop for any new material within 14 days.

14. Management Retainer

The retainer is optional. If you choose it, we look after your website on a monthly retainer. The retainer is tailored to your needs. If there is something we can help you with and we are able to do it, we will. Anything outside what your Quote already covers is agreed with you in writing before we start it. Your Quote may set a minimum term of [3] months. Its price, how you are charged and what it includes are set out in your written Quote. It can include maintenance, fixes, updates, improvements, and metrics and reporting. Redesigns, major new features, security services, backups and guaranteed uptime are not included unless your Quote says so.

You stay in control. Your website, domain, hosting and other accounts stay in your name. We only have the access you give us, and you can remove it at any time. If you remove access we need, we may not be able to carry out some of the work, and we will tell you.

Charges and cancelling. Recurring charges only start after you have agreed to them in writing. After any minimum term in your Quote, you can cancel at any time by email, and cancellation takes effect at the end of the month you have already paid for. Part-months are not refunded. Unused retainer hours or ad credits do not carry over beyond what your Quote allows and are not refunded. Removing our access does not cancel the retainer on its own, so please tell us if you want to cancel. We will give you at least 30 days' written notice of any price change.

Section 13 applies to work we create under the retainer, and rights transfer to you once that work has been paid for.

15. Advertising

If your Quote includes running advertising, your advertising accounts stay in your name and you pay advertising spend directly to the platform. You approve what we advertise and are responsible for your business claims being accurate. Platforms set their own rules and can reject or remove advertising.

16. Cancellation and ending our agreement

You can cancel your project at any time by telling us in writing. Your 35% deposit is kept as a cancellation fee, because it covers time reserved and early work. If the agreed value of the work completed up to cancellation is more than your deposit, we may invoice the difference, up to your total Quote. Unfinished work is not handed over unless all amounts for it have been paid.

We can end our agreement by written notice if you do not pay amounts due within 14 days of a reminder, if you seriously breach these terms and do not fix the breach within 14 days of being asked, or if you ask us to do something unlawful. If we end our agreement for one of these reasons, you must pay for work completed up to that date.

If we end our agreement for any other reason, we will refund any amount you have paid for work we have not completed.

17. What we promise and what we do not

We will carry out our work with reasonable care and skill. If you tell us within 30 days after handover about a fault that stops your website working as approved, we will fix it at no charge, unless the fault was caused by changes made after handover or by third-party services.

We do not guarantee results. This includes search rankings, website traffic, leads, sales, revenue, advertising performance, or that third-party services will always be available or work without interruption. Interactive 3D may display differently on older devices, where a simpler version is provided.

We build for the current versions of the major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox) on desktop and phone at the time of handover. Later changes by browsers, platforms, payment providers or other third parties may need updates, which are quoted separately unless covered by a retainer.

Custom programs are built to the Scope in your Quote and checked by you before final payment. After the 30-day fix period they are provided as they are. Hosting, running costs and third-party accounts they rely on are yours.

We follow good practice for accessibility, security and privacy, but we do not certify that your website meets any particular legal standard. If you need a formal audit, we can quote for it or you can arrange one.

Except as stated in these terms, and so far as the law allows, we give no other warranties.

18. Liability

So far as the law allows:

• our total liability to you for anything connected with our services is limited to the amount you have paid us for the service concerned in the 12 months before the claim arose; and
• we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, data or goodwill.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for fraud, or any liability that cannot legally be limited.

19. Content you supply

If a third party makes a claim against us because content you supplied breaks the law or infringes their rights, you agree to cover our reasonable losses and costs from that claim. This applies only to the extent the claim was caused by your content.

20. Confidentiality and personal information

Each of us will keep the other's non-public business information confidential and use it only for this project, unless the law requires otherwise or the information is already public.

Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information. Once your website is live, you are responsible for personal information collected through it. If we can access that information under a retainer, we will only use it to provide our services to you.

21. Events outside our control

Neither of us is responsible for a delay or failure caused by something outside our reasonable control, such as an outage at a third-party provider, a natural disaster or serious illness. This does not excuse payment of amounts already due.

22. Disputes

If a problem comes up, please tell us in writing first. We will both try in good faith to resolve it within 14 days. If we cannot, we will consider mediation before going to court, except where urgent relief is needed.

23. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of New Zealand, where SI Studios is based.

If you are based in the United States, the federal laws of the United States and the laws of your state that cannot be excluded by agreement also apply, and nothing in these terms takes away a right you have under them.

The courts of New Zealand have non-exclusive jurisdiction. This means a claim can also be brought in the courts of the United States state where you are based, or elsewhere, if the law allows it.

24. General

• Changes to these terms: the version in force when you accepted applies to your project. Changes for ongoing services need at least 30 days' written notice.
• Whole agreement: your Quote, Scope and these terms are our whole agreement on this subject.
• Notices: these can be given by email to the address each of us last provided.
• Electronic acceptance: ticking a box, signing electronically or confirming by email is binding.
• Our people: during our agreement and for 12 months after it ends, you agree not to directly hire or engage anyone who worked on your project for us without our written consent.
• Subcontractors: we may use trusted subcontractors and tools to carry out work. We stay responsible for their work under these terms.
• Assignment: neither of us may transfer this agreement without the other's written consent, except to a business that takes over the relevant operations.
• Invalid terms: if part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies.
• Surviving terms: sections on payment, ownership, confidentiality and liability continue after our agreement ends.

Questions? Email [email protected].

Business details: SI Studios is the trading name of Trent Nelson, sole trader, based in Auckland, New Zealand. Contact: [email protected].