Terms of service.

Every project starts with a written quote that lists what is included: the pages, the features, the number of revision rounds and the timeline. That list is the scope. Anything outside it is quoted separately before we do it, so the price does not drift. A quote stays open for 30 days.

A deposit of 50% of the quote books your project in and nothing starts until it is paid, and the balance is due before the site goes live. On quotes over NZ$4,000 the deposit is 30%, and the balance is paid in two parts, one at design sign-off and one before launch. The deposit comes off the final invoice, it is not on top. Invoices are in New Zealand dollars and are due within 7 days. No GST added: Tea Break Studio is not registered for GST, so no GST is charged, and your quote and invoice show one total, which is what you pay. Care plans are billed in advance, monthly or yearly. If your quote offers a weekly plan and you choose it, clause 3 takes the place of the deposit and balance. Clause 4 says what happens if a payment is late, and clause 7 covers cancelling and refunds.

Some quotes offer a weekly plan instead of a deposit and balance. It is only for businesses buying for their business, and before you start we ask you to confirm that in a short, separate note. Before you agree, your written quote and the checkout page both show the weekly amount, the number of weekly payments and the total. Paying weekly costs more in total than paying up front, and the quote shows both, so you can choose. Nothing is added on top of the total.

The first payment is taken by card when you sign up, and the rest from the same card on the same day each week. The payments stop by themselves after the last one. Once the site is live, it is a fixed agreement for all the payments, not a subscription you can stop part way, so stopping the card does not cancel what is owed. Before the site is live, clause 7 covers cancelling. You can pay off the rest at any time, with no extra fee.

When you sign up, the checkout asks you to tick that you agree to these terms. That tick, your written yes to the quote and the receipt for your first payment make the agreement binding. There is nothing to sign on paper.

Until the last payment, the site runs on our hosting and we keep the copyright in its design and code. Your domain, logo, photos and words are yours the whole time, and we never touch your domain or email. Once you have paid in full, the copyright passes to you and, if you want, we move the site into your own hosting account within 7 days. If we do not deliver the site as agreed, you can stop paying for the part we have not done, and clause 7 applies.

A late payment is usually a card that expired, and a quick message sorts it. If it does not, this is what happens, in this order. Paying at any step stops it there.

• A weekly payment fails. Stripe, our card payment provider, tries the card again over the next week and emails you a link to update it. We send a friendly reminder too.
• Two weekly payments are missed, or an invoice is overdue. We email you a written notice: what is owed, how to pay, and a date 14 days away.
• Still unpaid by that date. On a weekly plan, all the weekly payments still to come, plus any missed, are due straight away, with nothing added. If the site runs on our hosting, as it does on a weekly plan, we can also pause the site, showing a plain “temporarily offline” page, until you are up to date. Nothing is deleted, and your domain and email are not touched. We send a final notice giving you 7 more days.
• Still unpaid after that. We can pass the amount to a debt collector, or claim it through the Disputes Tribunal or the District Court.

If an amount is still unpaid 14 days after our written notice, you also pay the reasonable costs we actually pay to collect it, such as a debt collector’s fee and court or Tribunal filing fees. Never more than those costs. If it goes to a debt collector, we may give them, and a credit reporting company, your name, contact details and the amount owed.

We never delete your site, hold your domain, charge a fee to switch the site back on, or pause the site while you are raising a genuine problem with the work. We sort that problem out first, and either of us can take it to the Disputes Tribunal. Once you have paid what is due, we switch the site back on within 1 working day.

Your quote states the number of rounds of changes included, at the design stage and after the build. A round is one combined list of changes from you, so please gather your feedback before sending it. Extra rounds are a fixed add-on: NZ$190 a round on a website, store, app or AI build, and on 3D work NZ$60 a round on a still or reel and NZ$190 a round on a film or animation. A change of direction after design sign-off is quoted separately, in writing, before we start.

You own your site. Your domain, hosting, platform accounts and content are set up in your name from day one, and they stay yours if we part ways. The one exception is a weekly plan: the site runs on our hosting until the last payment, then moves to yours (clause 3). Once the final invoice is paid, you own the design and the site we built for you. We only show your project in our portfolio once you have read the case study and said yes. Work Nick did as an employee of another business, and his own products, are shown separately from client projects and labelled as such, with the owner's permission.

Anything you give us to use, such as photos, logos and text, must be yours or properly licensed. We may use open-source code, fonts and plugins in your site; those stay under their own licences.

The deposit is not a holding fee. It pays for a place in the schedule that I then stop offering to anyone else, and for the first stretch of work, which starts the day it clears. For that reason it is not refunded if you decide not to go ahead once I have begun.

You can cancel at any time by emailing me. If you do, I stop that day, I invoice you for the work done up to that point, and the deposit is credited against it. If the work done comes to more than the deposit, I invoice the difference at NZ$95 an hour. There is no separate cancellation fee on top, and I do not bill you for work I have not done. If I cancel, I invoice only the work completed and refund the rest of anything you have paid.

On a weekly plan, once the site is live, cancelling does not end the payments still owed (clause 3). Before the site is live, this clause works the same way, with your weekly payments so far in place of the deposit, and the weekly payments stop.

If you go quiet, I will follow up twice. If I have heard nothing 30 days after the second follow up, I treat the project as paused and release your slot. Picking it back up is welcome and costs nothing extra beyond a new start date, unless the work has gone stale enough to need redoing, in which case I quote that first.

If you do not like the direction of the first design, that is what the included rounds of changes are for, and I will keep working the design inside them. Not liking a first draft is not a refund; it is the next round, and the rounds are written on your quote.

None of this limits the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 where it applies to you, or the Fair Trading Act 1986. If the work is not carried out with reasonable care and skill, is not fit for a purpose you told me about, or is not delivered in a reasonable time, the deposit terms above do not apply to that. I will put it right, or refund what is fair for the part that was not delivered. If we cannot agree what is fair, either of us can take it to the Disputes Tribunal.

Care plans are billed in advance, monthly or yearly. You can cancel by email at any time. Your plan stays active until the end of the current month of service and no further payment is taken. If you paid yearly, we refund each complete unused month at one-twelfth of the yearly price. There is no exit fee. This does not affect any refund or other remedy required by New Zealand law. Every plan includes software updates, security patches, backups, uptime monitoring and a short written note each month. Each plan also includes an agreed amount of small changes per month; unused time does not roll over. Larger changes are quoted separately. If you cancel, we hand over any logins we hold and remove ourselves from your accounts.

We build and look after your site carefully, but we cannot promise results. We are not responsible for how much business the site brings in, for where search engines choose to rank the site, for outages at your hosting or domain provider, for changes made to the site by you or anyone else, or for content you supply. If something we did goes wrong, our responsibility is limited to the amount you paid us for that piece of work. Nothing here limits rights you have under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 where it applies.