Terms & Conditions

1. Who this is between

Web Gecko (ABN 32 300 992 377) of Suite 4034, Unit 9/235 Forest Lake Blvd, Forest Lake QLD 4078. In these terms that is "we", "us" and "our".

You are the person or business that engages us. In these terms that is "you" and "your".

These terms cover website design and build, hosting, care plans, social media management, and anything else we agree in writing.

You are bound by them when you accept a quote, sign our agreement, pay a deposit, or ask us to start.

Queensland law governs this agreement. The Australian Consumer Law applies to it. That law is Schedule 2 of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth), and we call it the ACL below.

Businesses can qualify as consumers under the ACL, including qualifying acquisitions below the statutory monetary threshold. Applicable consumer guarantees and remedies are preserved throughout these terms.

2. What we do

The work we sell, depending on what you have agreed with us:

• Website design and build
• Hosting, security updates and uptime monitoring
• Backups of your site and its data
• Site edits inside your monthly allowance
• Missed-call rescue, so a caller you cannot get to gets a text straight back
• Your own client portal
• Google Business Profile setup, and managed posting on the Care Growth plan
• Automatic review requests after paid jobs, on the Care Growth plan
• Social media accounts, content and community management, under WG-SOC-001
• Domain registration and management on your behalf
• The Website only plan: hosting with SSL, security updates, monthly backups, uptime monitoring, a monthly security and site health audit, search and AI-search upkeep, and 15 minutes of edits a month. It does not include missed-call rescue, the client portal, or Google Business Profile or review work. It makes no promise about search rankings.
• Anything else we agree in writing

The scope, the deliverables and the price are agreed in writing before we start. You get them by email or in your portal.

Anything not on that list is out of scope. We quote extra work before we do it, and it never turns up on an invoice as a surprise.

We may use subcontractors. They are bound to keep your information confidential, and we stay responsible to you for their work.

3. Prices and GST

All prices are in Australian dollars.

Web Gecko is not registered for GST. No GST is charged and none is included in any price we quote.

If we ever register for GST, it is added on top, and you get at least 30 days' written notice before that starts.

Your plan and its price are agreed in writing before you start, and they appear on every invoice.

4. Paying us

• Build deposit. Usually 50% of the build price, before build work starts. The amount is always stated in writing before you pay it. Section 5 overrides this: during a cooling-off period we ask for nothing and accept nothing.
• Final payment. Due before the site goes live. We do not publish a site that has not been paid for.
• Care and social plans. Billed monthly in advance at the price you agreed.
• Invoices. Due within 7 days.
• Late payment. If an invoice passes its due date we send you a written reminder. If it is still unpaid 7 days after that reminder, we may pause new work and non-essential management tasks, and simple interest of 10% a year starts to run on the amount outstanding. Interest runs from that point, never from the due date, and it never compounds.

We keep your paid hosting available through its agreed end date. Pausing work does not let us withhold your files or domain. We confirm a reasonable restart date when the account is settled; hosting is not promised indefinitely after it ends.

We do not hold your files, your domain or your Google Business Profile to collect a debt. A debt is chased as a debt, not by switching your business off.

Stripe processes payments for us. Card and bank details are entered on Stripe's own page. We never see them and we never store them.

If money is genuinely tight, tell us. We will work out a payment plan rather than escalate.

Refunds are covered by the Cancellation and Refund Policy (WG-CAN-001).

5. Cooling off, if we approached you

This section applies when we contacted you first, by phone or in person, and you had not asked us to. The ACL calls that an unsolicited consumer agreement (sections 69 to 95).

You then have 10 business days to cancel, for any reason, at no cost.

If we agreed the deal on the phone, those 10 days start on the business day after you receive the written agreement, not the day of the call. We have 5 business days to give you that document.

You can cancel from the day a face-to-face agreement is made until the end of the tenth business day after that day.

Business days do not include weekends or Queensland public holidays.

During that period we will not start any work, and we will not ask for or accept any payment, deposit included. So there is nothing to refund.

To cancel, just tell us. A call, a text or an email is enough.

If we broke either of those rules, your right to cancel can run for up to six months, on work we have already done.

If you came to us, none of this applies, and we can invoice and start straight away.

6. Signing electronically

We usually send the agreement as a link. You read it, type your full name, tick the consent box and submit it.

This records your identity, intention and consent to electronic signing. Applicable electronic-transactions requirements and any separate supplier-signature requirements must also be satisfied; customer acceptance alone is not a signed copyright assignment by the rights holder.

When you sign that way we record three times: when we sent it, when you first opened it, and when you accepted. We also record your IP address, your browser and the name you typed. Those times come from our server, not from your device.

We also store a SHA-256 fingerprint of the exact document you were shown. If a signed document does not match its fingerprint, we refuse the signature rather than file it.

Ask us any time for a copy of what you signed and the record that goes with it.

You can sign on paper instead. Tell us and we will send it that way.

7. Who owns what

On payment of the agreed build fee, we will transfer the copyright we own in deliverables created specifically for you through a written assignment signed by the relevant rights holder. Your own materials and domain remain yours. We cannot transfer rights we do not own.

Our existing tools and reusable components remain ours. For our components embedded in your delivered website, we grant a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use, host, maintain and modify that website, including through another provider and transfer with your business. Third-party and open-source materials keep their own licences, which we identify at handover. AI-assisted material may not attract exclusive copyright. Moral rights remain with individual authors; any required consent is dealt with separately.

We ask before using your name, logo or story as a case study or testimonial.

8. What you give us

You agree to:

• Give us the content, photos and information the job needs, and keep them accurate
• Approve drafts and proofs within 5 business days
• Give us your trade licence number if your trade needs one, and tell us when it changes
• Tell us promptly about an error or a change you need
• Keep any logins we give you to yourself

Licence numbers. Section 54 of the Queensland Building and Construction Commission Act 1991 requires a licensed contractor to show their licence number in advertising. That includes your website and your social posts. You supply the number and we put it on. We publish what you give us and we do not check it against the QBCC register. The obligation, and the penalty for getting it wrong, is yours.

You confirm that you own the content you send us, or have permission to use it. Each party remains responsible under applicable law for its own breach, negligence or infringement. A claim does not automatically make you responsible for our costs. We promptly notify each other of relevant claims and cooperate reasonably. Neither party may settle a claim on behalf of the other without written agreement.

The build timeline moves day for day with a delay on your side. We are not responsible for a delay we did not cause.

If we do not hear from you for 30 days during a build after asking for something we need, we pause the project rather than let it stall silently. We tell you before that happens, there is no fee for pausing, and we pick up when you are ready.

9. Edits and extra work

A care plan includes 45 minutes of site edits a month. Unused minutes roll over to the next month.

The Website only plan includes 15 minutes of site edits a month. Unused minutes do not roll over.

Time beyond that is billed at $190 an hour, pro rata, so a 20-minute job costs 20 minutes. We quote it before we start it.

Work outside the agreed scope is quoted the same way, at the same rate.

10. Hosting, uptime and backups

We aim to keep your site up, and we do not promise 100% availability. Nobody can.

Planned maintenance, an outage at a provider, or something outside our reasonable control can interrupt it. We give you notice of planned work where we can.

We take regular backups while your plan is active.

Ask for your handover copy before hosting ends. We aim to retain a final recovery copy for 90 days. Provider backups and records needed for legal obligations or claims may have different retention periods. Our Privacy Policy explains deletion requests and retained records.

This section does not reduce the consumer guarantees in section 14.

11. The services we depend on

Running your site means using other companies. Cloudflare hosts it and captures your form enquiries. Stripe takes payments. Twilio sends text messages. Resend sends email. Google runs your Business Profile. Your domain sits with a registrar.

We remain responsible for our agreed work with due care and skill. Third-party outages or changes may affect delivery; we notify you and take reasonable steps to reduce the impact. Additional costs or material scope changes require agreement. This does not exclude obligations or remedies that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Our Privacy Policy (WG-PRV-001) lists who gets what information and where they hold it.

12. Emails and text messages

There are two kinds, and the difference matters.

Messages we send you about your own service, such as an invoice, a draft to approve, or a job update. Those are service messages.

Messages your system sends your customers, such as a review request, a missed-call text or a campaign. Before marketing messages go out, you must provide evidence of the necessary consent and any opt-outs. Both parties must meet the obligations applying to their role in sending or authorising messages under the Spam Act 2003. This agreement does not transfer or exclude our statutory responsibilities.

Every marketing email the system sends carries your business name, your contact details and an unsubscribe link, and every marketing text offers a STOP reply. Neither can be turned off. An unsubscribe is actioned within 5 business days, as the Act requires.

We do not filter review requests by how happy a customer is. Asking only the customers you expect to praise you is misleading conduct under ACL section 18. There is no rating setting in our software to do it with, which is deliberate.

We contact you to operate your service. Marketing calls and messages require an appropriate lawful basis and any necessary separate consent. Accepting our service agreement does not grant unlimited marketing permission. Tell us by any means to stop marketing and we record and action that request.

13. Privacy

We collect what we need to deliver your service and to invoice you. We do not sell your personal information to anybody. The Privacy Policy (WG-PRV-001) is the full list of what we hold, who we share it with, where it goes, and how to get a copy.

We also hold information about your customers, such as leads from your website, bookings, job photos and missed-call text threads. We hold it to run your service and on your instruction. We do not use it for our own marketing and we never sell it.

You are responsible for what your own business does with that information once it reaches you, including your own privacy obligations.

14. Your rights under the Australian Consumer Law

The ACL gives you guarantees that come with every service. They cannot be excluded, restricted or modified by anything in this agreement, and a clause that tried to do that would be void.

We guarantee our services are supplied with due care and skill, are fit for the purpose you told us about, and are delivered in a reasonable time.

Minor failure. We fix the problem, free, within a reasonable time.

Major failure. You can cancel and obtain the refund required by law, less a reasonable amount for work already done as expected, or keep the service and obtain compensation for its reduced value. The choice is yours.

You can also recover other reasonably foreseeable loss caused by the failure.

A service failure can be major if it is unsafe; if one serious problem or several smaller problems would have stopped a reasonable person buying it; or if it cannot meet its normal purpose, a disclosed purpose or an agreed result and cannot easily be fixed within a reasonable time. These examples do not limit your statutory rights. For other failures, we must fix the problem within a reasonable time; if we cannot or do not, further remedies may include cancellation or recovering reasonable costs of having it fixed elsewhere.

15. What we are liable for

We remain responsible for performing the agreed services with due care and skill. Liability and remedies are determined by applicable law. These standard terms impose no separate three-month liability cap or blanket exclusion of lost revenue, profit, data or other consequential loss. Nothing excludes, restricts or modifies rights or liabilities that cannot lawfully be excluded.

16. Confidentiality

Anything you tell us that is not already public stays confidential, and we use it only to deliver your service.

We share it only with the providers needed to run the service, who are bound to keep it confidential, or where the law requires us to. You owe us the same about anything of ours that is not public.

17. If something goes wrong

Contact us so we can try to resolve the problem. You may seek help from the Queensland Office of Fair Trading or apply to a tribunal or court with jurisdiction. QCAT filing fees may apply, with hardship relief available in some cases. Nothing here restricts statutory rights, urgent relief or applicable time limits.

18. Ending your plan

Care plans, the Website only plan and social plans run month to month. There is no minimum term, no lock-in and no exit fee.

Either party may end an ongoing service on 30 calendar days' notice. Notice starts when you send it; there is no extra billing-date cutoff. We confirm the end date and final account in writing. Charges cover service through that date. We refund prepaid service after that date, including unused parts of a month or annual prepayment, at the rate actually paid. Statutory cancellation and refund rights take precedence.

Service and hosting end on the confirmed cancellation date. We arrange handover before that date so you can move your site.

Your handover is free, whether you are moving to another provider or taking it in-house. You get the website files and source, your content and photos, and your domain, which is already in your name. You also get primary ownership of your Google Business Profile and the logins for any social accounts we hold. If you use our missed-call number, we release or port it to you on request.

For a material breach, either party may end the affected service if the other does not fix it after written notice and a reasonable opportunity to do so. Non-payment pauses are limited as described in section 4. We may restrict access urgently only to the extent reasonably necessary for security or to comply with law, and explain promptly. We do not withhold files or domains as debt security. Statutory rights to end a service sooner remain unchanged.

Refunds on cancelling are covered by the Cancellation and Refund Policy (WG-CAN-001).

19. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms when there is a real reason to, such as a change in the law, a security requirement, or the cost of running the service.

You get at least 30 days' written notice of any material change, including a price rise, by email or in your portal.

If you do not accept it, you can end the affected service before it starts, with no cancellation fee.

A change never applies backwards, and fixed-price work already agreed keeps its price.

20. The whole agreement

Your agreement with us is these terms, your signed service agreement, the Privacy Policy (WG-PRV-001) and the Cancellation and Refund Policy (WG-CAN-001). If you buy social, the Social Media Terms (WG-SOC-001) are part of it too. Together they replace anything said before them.

If your signed service agreement says something different from these terms, the signed agreement wins.

If a court finds one clause unenforceable, the rest of the agreement still stands.