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.

You are a consumer under the ACL. A service under $100,000 is a consumer acquisition, even when you buy it to run your business. So the consumer guarantees in section 14 apply to everything we sell you.

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
• 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 suspend the service, 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 suspend, we never delete. Your site, your files, your data and your domain stay intact and stay yours, and everything is restored the day the account is settled.

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.

If we agreed it face to face, they start on the day you agreed.

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.

That is a valid signature under the Electronic Transactions Act 1999 (Cth) and the Electronic Transactions (Queensland) Act 2001.

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

When you pay the build fee, we assign all copyright in your website to you. That covers the code, the design, the layout and the words we write for it. This clause is the written assignment, and it takes effect on payment without anything else being signed.

We say that out loud because the default in Australia is the opposite. A developer keeps copyright in a site even after the client has paid in full, and copyright can only be assigned in writing. Without this clause you could not lawfully move your own site to another provider.

Your domain is registered in your name. Your content and photos stay yours.

We keep our own tools, templates and internal processes, the things we reuse for every client. Those are not licensed to you.

Moral rights, which are attribution and integrity, stay with the individual author under Australian law and cannot be assigned by anyone. That does not limit what you can do with your site.

We may show your finished site as our work, as a screenshot and a link. Tell us not to and we stop. We ask you first before we use your name, your logo or your story as a case study or a 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 that you are allowed to use it. If someone makes a claim about content you supplied, you cover our costs of dealing with it. That cover is limited to claims about your content, and it does not extend to our own mistakes.

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.

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.

When you leave we keep one final backup for 90 days, then delete it. Ask us for anything from it before that window closes.

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.

Their outages, price changes and policy changes sit outside this agreement. We work around them where we reasonably can. We cannot promise on their behalf.

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. You are the sender of those. Under the Spam Act 2003 you need the recipient's consent before a marketing message goes out, and you are responsible for having it.

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.

By signing our service agreement you agree that we can call you about your service and about what else we offer. That consent lasts while the agreement runs, or until you tell us to stop. Tell us to stop, by any means, and we stop permanently. We say this here because the Do Not Call Register Act has no exemption for existing customers, so your consent is what makes the call lawful.

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 get a refund for the part you have not used, or keep the service and be compensated for the drop in its value. The choice is yours, not ours.

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

A failure is major in three cases. A reasonable person would not have bought the service knowing about the problem. The service is substantially unfit for its purpose. Or it cannot be fixed in a reasonable time.

15. What we are liable for

This section is always subject to section 14 and never overrides it.

Our services are not the kind ordinarily bought for personal, domestic or household use. For a failure that is not major, section 64A of the ACL lets us limit our liability. The limit is supplying the service again, or paying the cost of having it supplied again. We rely on that limit, and we cannot rely on it where doing so would not be fair and reasonable in your circumstances.

Outside a failure of a consumer guarantee, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss. That includes lost revenue, lost profit, lost business, lost data and damage to reputation.

Outside a failure of a consumer guarantee, our total liability for a claim is limited to what you paid us in the 3 months before the event that caused it.

That cap does not apply to a failure of a consumer guarantee, to death or personal injury, or to fraud. Nothing here limits a liability the law says cannot be limited.

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

Tell us first. Call or email, and most things sort out in a day.

If it is still not resolved 14 days after you put it in writing, either of us can take it further.

Free options for you: the Queensland Office of Fair Trading, or the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT), which handles minor civil disputes up to $25,000.

Nothing in this section stops you contacting the ACCC, going to court, or using any other right you have. This is a first step, not a barrier.

18. Ending your plan

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

Either of us can end the ongoing service with 30 days' written notice before your next billing date. The notice period is the same both ways.

Your service runs to the end of the period you have paid for. Hosting with us ends on that day, so your site stops being served from our servers from then.

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.

We can suspend or end the service earlier for a serious or repeated breach, such as non-payment after the notice in section 4. We tell you why in writing first, and you get a chance to fix it. You have the same right against us.

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.