Payment terms, cancellation & refunds

Quoting and scope

• Work is quoted per engagement against a written scope. The quote and the scope together are the agreement.
• Prices are in Canadian dollars.
• No GST/HST is charged. I am a small supplier under the CRA threshold. If that changes, tax is added to invoices from the date of registration and you will be told in advance.
• Anything outside the written scope is quoted separately before it is started. You will not find surprise line items on an invoice.
• Quotes are valid for 30 days.

Payment

• Projects: 50% deposit to book the work and reserve the time, balance on completion. Engagements over $15,000 are usually split into milestones instead, so neither of us is carrying the whole amount.
• Retainers and care plans: invoiced monthly in advance.
• Ad-hoc work: invoiced monthly in arrears against time recorded.
• Terms: net 15 days from the invoice date.
• Preferred payment: Interac e-transfer or direct deposit — no processing fee for either of us. Card payment can be arranged; if any processing fee applies it is disclosed to you before you pay, never added afterwards.
• Late payment: 1.5% per month (18% per year) on overdue amounts. Work may pause on accounts more than 30 days overdue, and I will tell you before that happens rather than going quiet.

What the deposit is for

It reserves capacity. When I book your project I stop offering that time to anyone else, so a cancellation costs me the window rather than just the hours worked. That is the whole reason it exists, and it is why the refund terms below are shaped the way they are.

Cancellation and refunds

If you cancel

• Within 7 days of paying the deposit, and before work has started — full refund. No reason needed.
• After work has started: you are billed for work completed and committed to date; the rest of the deposit is refunded. You keep everything produced up to that point, including drafts, research and audit findings.
• Once a project passes 50% of the agreed scope, the deposit is non-refundable — by then it has been earned.
• Retainers and care plans: cancel with 30 days' written notice. The current month is not refunded; nothing further is invoiced. No minimum term, no auto-renewal trap.

If I cancel

• You are refunded everything not yet earned, in full, within 14 days.
• You get everything produced so far plus a written handover of where things stand, so another developer can pick it up without starting over.
• If I cannot finish for a reason that is mine, I will help you find someone who can.

Long pauses

If a project stalls on your side for more than 60 days — approvals, content, internal changes, it happens — I may close it out and invoice for work completed. Restarting later is welcome and gets re-quoted against current availability.

What you own

• On full payment, you own the work — the code written for you, the content, the designs, the reports.
• Everything lives in your accounts and repositories from the start. Domains, hosting, analytics and ad accounts are yours and stay yours.
• I keep the right to reuse general techniques, tooling and know-how — I cannot unlearn how to do my job — and to describe the work publicly in general terms unless we agree otherwise in writing.
• Third-party licences (fonts, stock images, paid plugins) are yours to hold, and I will tell you which ones apply before they are used.

After launch

Defects in work I delivered are fixed free for 30 days after launch. That covers things that do not work as agreed — not new requests, and not problems introduced by changes made by others. Beyond that, fixes are quoted, or covered by a care plan.

Questions

These are standard terms, not a negotiating position. If your procurement process needs different ones, ask — m@koval.email.

Last updated August 23, 2026. These terms are a plain-language summary for a business-to-business engagement and are not legal advice. Where a signed agreement exists between us, that agreement takes precedence over this page.