Terms of Service

These terms cover how Stratus Creative works with clients. They are written in plain English on purpose. If anything here is unclear, email business@stratus-creative.com and we will rewrite the offending sentence.

1. Who we are

Stratus Creative is a sole-proprietor design and engineering studio owned and operated by James Farmer in Simpsonville, South Carolina. In these terms, “Stratus,” “we,” and “us” mean the studio. “You” means the person or business that has hired us or signed up for one of our services.

2. What we provide

Stratus offers three lines of work:

• Local-business websites. A productized Starter tier with fixed pricing and a 5–7 business day turnaround, and a Custom tier scoped per project with a fixed-price quote.
• AI workflows and agents. One-time build engagements paired with an optional monthly AI Care subscription. Underlying API usage is billed at cost or run on your own keys.
• Online presence. Google Business Profile setup, reputation and reviews management, and similar work, sold standalone or bundled into custom engagements.

Current pricing for each tier lives on the public services pages and in your written quote. Posted prices change occasionally; the quote you accept is the price you pay.

3. Engagements and quotes

Engagements start one of two ways: you purchase a Starter package through the website, or you accept a written proposal from us for a custom engagement. Either way, the document that defines what you are paying for is the proposal or product description, not a verbal conversation.

Each quote spells out the deliverables, the price, the payment schedule, the timeline assumptions, and what is explicitly out of scope. Quotes are valid for 30 days from issue unless we wrote a different window into the proposal. After that we reserve the right to re-quote.

Scope changes are normal. If you ask for work outside the original scope, we will write a short change order with the additional cost and timeline impact and wait for your written approval before starting it. We will not silently expand the bill.

4. Payment terms

All amounts are in US dollars. Payments are processed through Stripe; we do not store card numbers.

• Starter websites are paid in full upfront. Work begins once payment clears and your intake materials are received.
• Custom engagements are billed 50% on signature and 50% on launch, unless your proposal specifies a different schedule (larger projects are sometimes split into milestone payments).
• Monthly subscriptions (hosting, AI Care, reputation management) renew automatically on the date of your initial signup until you cancel.
• Pass-through API costs for AI workflows are billed monthly in arrears at cost, with no markup. You can also bring your own API keys, in which case those charges hit your account directly and we do not see them.

Invoices are due on receipt. Anything more than 14 days overdue may pause active work and accrue a 1.5% monthly late fee on the outstanding balance.

5. Delivery and timelines

Starter websites ship in 5–7 business days from a clean intake. A clean intake means we have your content, brand assets, and any third-party access we need to do the work. Custom engagements run 2–6 weeks depending on scope, with the actual window written into your proposal.

Timelines assume you respond to questions and review requests within a reasonable window — usually 2 business days. If responses stall, the schedule slides by the same amount. We will tell you when it happens, not after.

6. Revisions and changes

Starter packages include one round of revisions on the delivered site. Custom engagements include two rounds, or whatever your proposal specifies. A round means consolidated feedback in a single pass — not an open-ended back-and-forth.

For 30 days after launch, we fix bugs and make minor copy or image swaps at no additional cost. Larger changes after that — new pages, new features, redesigns — are quoted separately at our standard rates.

7. Intellectual property

Once final payment clears, you own the deliverables: the website files, the page content we wrote together, the designs, the workflow configurations, and the prompts. The work product is yours to use, host elsewhere, modify, or kill.

Stratus retains ownership of the underlying tools, components, templates, libraries, and code patterns we reuse across projects. Nothing here grants you a license to those building blocks outside the deliverable they ship inside of.

We reserve the right to display completed work in our portfolio and case studies. If a project is sensitive, tell us — we will redact business names, screenshots, or specifics on request, or keep the project off the portfolio entirely.

8. Hosting and ongoing services

Hosting and AI Care are month-to-month. There is no contract length and no cancellation fee. Cancel by emailing us; the service ends at the end of your current billing period and we do not issue partial-month refunds.

On cancellation we provide reasonable migration support: the current site files and a handoff to the hosting provider of your choice, completed within 14 business days of your request. If you would rather just take it down, we will.

8a. Domain registration (Starter only)

Every Starter package includes one standard .com domain registered in your name for the first year. We cover registration costs up to $20 USD. The domain is yours from day one — registered in your account, with you as the legal owner. You can transfer it out at any time, free.

Two cases fall outside this inclusion:

• Premium .com names listed by registrars or aftermarket sellers above $20 — we will tell you the exact cost difference before we register; you can pay the pass-through difference (no markup) or pick a different .com.
• Non-.com TLDs (.io, .co, .net, .ai, country codes, etc.) — not included; available at-cost as a pass-through.

Renewal after year one is entirely your responsibility. The registrar will email you directly using the contact info on the domain account, typically 30–60 days before expiration. You can renew with them, transfer to a different registrar, or let it lapse — your choice. We do not auto-renew on your behalf, we do not charge a renewal fee, and we do not monitor renewal dates.

If you do not renew, Stratus Creative is not responsible for any consequences — including the site becoming unreachable, the domain entering grace period or redemption pricing, the domain being claimed by someone else after expiration, or the cost or effort of recovering it. Keeping the contact email on file with the registrar accurate, watching for renewal notices, and paying on time are all on you.

Custom engagements do not include a bundled domain — domains are quoted as part of the proposal because requirements (multiple TLDs, premium names, specific registrar, existing portfolios) vary.

9. Refunds

Starter packages carry a 7-day money-back guarantee, with the full mechanics — what qualifies, when work in progress affects the refund, how to request one — in our Refund Policy. Subscriptions can be cancelled any time and stop billing at the end of the current period. Custom engagements follow the milestone schedule in their proposal.

10. AI workflows

AI workflows have a few specifics worth calling out:

• API costs are pass-through. We bill at cost or you run on your own keys. Either way, you are responsible for the usage your workflows generate.
• AI outputs are probabilistic. We design, test, and harden the workflows we build, but we do not warrant that any individual model output is accurate, complete, or free of hallucination. You are responsible for human review where the stakes warrant it.
• You own the prompts, configurations, and any data you feed into the workflow. We do not train on your data and we do not resell it.
• AI Care is a monthly subscription that covers monitoring, model updates, prompt tuning, and minor changes. Cancel any time; service continues through the paid period.

11. Acceptable use

Full rules live in our Acceptable Use Policy. The short version: do not use our services for anything illegal, do not weaponize the AI features for spam, scraping at abusive scale, or generation of harmful content, and do not resell our services as your own without a written agreement.

12. Confidentiality

Anything you share with us that is not already public — business data, customer lists, internal documents, login credentials, draft content — we treat as confidential and use only to do the work. We expect the same back: information about how we build, our internal tooling, and our pricing strategy is not for republication. NDAs are available on request for engagements that need one.

13. Warranties and disclaimers

We stand behind the explicit promises in these terms and in your proposal: the money-back guarantee on Starter, the 30-day post-launch defect fix window, the pass-through pricing on API costs. Beyond those promises, services are provided as is. We do not warrant uninterrupted operation, fitness for a particular purpose, or that AI-generated content will be correct.

Some parts of what we deliver depend on third parties — Vercel for hosting, Supabase for databases, Resend for email, Stripe for payments, Anthropic for AI. Outages or changes at those providers are outside our control.

14. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent allowed by law, Stratus is not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages — lost profits, lost data, lost business — arising out of the services. Our total liability for any claim, regardless of form, is capped at the fees you paid us in the 12 months immediately before the claim, or the total cost of the engagement if shorter.

15. Indemnification

You will defend and hold us harmless against claims arising from content, data, or materials you provide to us — for example, copyright claims on text or imagery you supplied, or claims tied to how you use the deliverables in your business.

We will defend and hold you harmless against third-party claims that the original work we created infringes their intellectual property. This does not cover modifications you or anyone else made after delivery, or third-party components used as documented.

16. Termination

Either of us can end the relationship with written notice. Subscriptions stop at the end of the current period. For active project work, you owe for work completed up to the termination date and any non-refundable third-party costs we incurred on your behalf; refunds, if any, follow the Refund Policy.

We may suspend or terminate immediately for non-payment, abuse of the services, or violation of the Acceptable Use Policy.

17. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of South Carolina, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute that cannot be worked out by email will be resolved in the state or federal courts in Greenville County, South Carolina, and both sides agree to that venue.

18. Changes to these terms

We update these terms occasionally. The current version always lives on this page with the “last updated” date at the top. If a change materially affects active clients — pricing structure, liability, ownership — we will email the contact on file before it takes effect.

19. Contact

Questions, disputes, NDA requests, or anything else related to these terms: business@stratus-creative.com. We reply within 4 hours during business hours.