Terms

Summary of our standard terms, for information. Not an offer. Work is agreed only by a signed order.

Terms summary v1.0, 23 August 2026. Superseded versions are archived under /terms/archive/.

Business supply only. Not offered to consumers. Governed by the law of England and Wales.

You contract with Deal Baker Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 14906367, at International House, 64 Nile Street, London N1 7SR. That is the counterparty on the order, and it is checkable against the register before you sign anything.

Term 1 — Provenance

The person who makes the promise is the person who keeps it. I scope your build on the first call, I am accountable for the roadmap, and I am on your weekly call.

That holds whoever is paying. Work bought through someone else’s paper is the same work: the person on the first call is the person who holds the roadmap start to finish, and who is invoicing whom changes nothing about who answers for the result.

That is not a claim about whose hands are on the keyboard. The work is carried by a fleet this company builds and operates, and Term 6 — What You Send Us says exactly what that means for your material. It is a claim about who answers for the result, and it is checked every week rather than taken on trust.

Term 2 — Cancellation

There is nothing to cancel. Nothing is owed until the system has cleared your bar. Neither side is obliged to offer or accept further work. The signed contract governs. This page describes it.

Term 3 — Your Time

One weekly call, and whatever else you choose. Nothing else is assumed of you.

Written progress arrives before the call, so the call is about decisions rather than status. Written questions you answer when you like. A demo you can skip.

If more is needed, we ask. You can say no — we go and find the answer another way and flag the assumption we made.

Term 4 — Continuity

Continuity is provided for rather than promised: what a successor receives, and what happens to the contracting company itself, are both written down and testable.

Working hours are 08:00–17:00 CET. There is no on-call unless it is separately contracted, and the unavailability policy is published on this page, not settled case by case. The full account, technical and corporate, is further down this page.

Term 5 — Rate

One decision, cast and running. The invoice reads: One decision cast: the named call — in production, deciding your own cases. One fixed sum, agreed before the build starts, named when the decision is named.

There is no denominator inside it. Not an hour, a day, a seat or a month — you are not buying a quantity of anyone’s time, and there is no half of it to buy.

It decides, it does not integrate. Inputs arrive in whatever form you already have them: a file, an export, a paste. Plumbing it into your stack is a second casting at a second sum, and it is refused rather than discounted.

Built first, shown running, then invoiced once. The invoice falls due when the system clears the bar you wrote before the build began, on your own cases. If the invoice is not paid, the sources stay with us and the instance keeps running on our infrastructure until the invoice clears.

FX and receiving-bank charges are the buyer's side. The VAT position: Not registered for VAT.

Our liability is capped at the total fees paid under the engagement. Late payment carries interest at Bank of England base rate plus eight percentage points, the statutory rate under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998.

Intellectual property in the work transfers on payment of the invoice covering that work.

What this includes: the sitting where you name the decision; the build, and the weekly rhythm that carries it — written progress before the call, one call a week, the proposed scope you accept or cut, and a board you can open at any hour; the system running on your own cases; and the assignment on payment. The rhythm is how the build is carried, not a service sold alongside it: it starts when the build starts and it stops when the bar is cleared and the invoice is settled.

What this is not: 24/7 on-call. Integration into your stack. A quantity of time.

Full MSA and DPA on request.

Term 6 — What You Send Us

Before there is a contract. What you send us before an engagement — what you write here, and what you say on the read-back call — is read by me, and by nobody else.

The cases the system is built against. A build runs on your own cases, because a decision that has never met a real one has not been shown to work. You pick them. They are used to build and to prove the system that decides them, and for nothing else: not to train a model that is sold on, and not in any other engagement.

During an engagement. The work is carried by a fleet of AI agents this company builds and operates. Your code, your data and the systems they run against are processed by that fleet. That is how the work gets done at this price, it is said here rather than discovered later, and it is written into the DPA rather than left to a page.

What is never delegated. What gets built, what gets refused, and who answers for it. A tool that writes code does not change who answers for it.

What we cannot promise yet. The retention periods are not set. They sit with an accountant and a contract reviewer, and until they come back this says so rather than publishing a period nobody has decided. The current position is available on request, in writing.

If your side needs signed paper before you send anything, say so in one line and we will sign your NDA or send you ours. You do not need one for the paragraph above to bind us.

Please do not paste anyone else's personal data here — customer lists, CVs, records. We do not want it and have no basis to hold it. Describe it instead. If it arrives anyway it is deleted and you are told.

Intellectual property

Deal Baker Ltd assigns all intellectual property in the work to the client on payment of the invoice covering that work. Deal Baker Ltd warrants that it holds equivalent written agreements with every person who does development work on the engagement, so the chain of title runs unbroken from the keyboard to you. Those agreements are not named individually, and the warranty holds whether a line was typed by a person or produced by a tool that person operates and answers for.

Payment timing — what triggers the transfer — is set by Term 5 — Rate.

Accountability

The person who makes the promise is the person who keeps it, and is on the weekly call. That is Term 1 — Provenance.

Continuity, technical and corporate

Nothing that matters ends up anywhere you cannot reach. Until the bar is cleared and the invoice is settled, the build runs on our infrastructure and the sources stay with us — that is the whole of what stands behind a system built before anyone has paid for it, and it is the standing remedy in Term 5 above rather than a separate one. On payment it moves, and it moves whole: code into your own repository organisation, infrastructure into your own cloud and vendor accounts wherever the vendor permits it, credentials into your own password manager, documentation into your own wiki. After that you revoke what you like without asking anyone.

A delivered, paid system has no lock-in in it, and that is checkable rather than taken on trust: it runs on accounts you hold, under credentials you control, with nothing of ours anywhere in the path. Together those are the handover pack, and on top of them sits a written “if we are unavailable” runbook: what runs, where it runs, what breaks first, what to check, who to call. It is written for a competent engineer who has never met us and cannot ask us anything, because that is the only test of a handover pack that means anything. See Term 4 — Continuity.

Once it is yours we hold nothing of yours to back up. Code, infrastructure and credentials sit in your own estate, so restore is your operation on your systems, not a promise we make about ours.

A company with a single director has an ordinary failure mode, and it is worth stating plainly. When the director dies, the authority to sign, to invoice and to assign intellectual property has nowhere to sit while the estate is settled, and a shareholding that passes through probate takes months to reach whoever inherits it. In those months the company can freeze. Invoices cannot be raised or paid, intellectual property cannot be assigned, and a healthy engagement stalls on a legal formality rather than on anything technical. The fix is already done: a successor director is appointed in advance, with signed instructions and a cross-option agreement, so authority passes without waiting for probate. See Term 4 — Continuity.

Data protection

We are the controller for our own business contacts and the processor for client data handled under an engagement. A DPA, the security posture, and the list of sub-processors used under an engagement are available on request. The inbound path is a separate question and it is already answered in public: every party between the intake form and the mailbox is named on your data, along with what is stored.