What this page is. A plain-English summary of how working with Beacon Web Studio works — what you get, what you pay, and what happens if either of us walks away. The legally-binding version lives in the short contract we'll send before you sign up; please read both. Where this page and the contract say different things, the contract wins.
1. Who we are
Beacon Web Studio is a small web studio based in Fife, Scotland. When this page says “we” or “us” that's who you're dealing with. When it says “you” that means the business buying the plan.
You can reach us at hello@beaconwebstudio.uk.
2. What you're buying
One of the plans on the pricing page. Every plan has a one-off build fee — that pays for the built site itself, which is yours to keep. Tier 1 stops there. Tiers 2–4 add a monthly hosting & care fee for ongoing service while you're on the plan.
The tier you pick sets:
- How many pages we build for you up front (the base build covers up to four pages).
- Whether you host the site yourself (Tier 1) or we host it for you (Tiers 2–4).
- What ongoing care is included on Tiers 2–4 — hosting, SSL, monitoring, and the support level for that tier.
- Whether business email setup is included.
The build fee buys you the built site — on every tier. The rendered HTML, CSS, images, and any copy we wrote specifically for your site are yours. Tier 1 receives those files at delivery (you host the site yourself from day one). Tier 2–4 clients receive those files when the relationship ends — see section 12. The reusable framework we use to build Beacon sites (the underlying template, design system, and build pipeline) stays ours; the specific instance we build for you is yours.
Whatever's on the pricing page is what we deliver. Add-ons (booking, enquiry/callback flows, etc.) are priced and scoped separately and have their own line on your invoice.
3. What you pay, and when
Currency. Prices are in pounds sterling (GBP). We're not currently VAT-registered, so no VAT is charged at present; if that changes we'll give you reasonable notice.
Build fee — paid up front. The build fee is payable in full, up front. It falls due either when you accept your free working preview, or — where there is no preview — when you sign the order form. We don't start the full build until it's cleared. The reason this works without a deposit: the free preview already lets you see real work before you pay anything, so the trust step a deposit usually protects is already covered.
Exception — deposit split for larger or bespoke work. For unusually large builds, or for bespoke booking/ordering add-ons that carry real third-party and database costs, your invoice may instead set a deposit now / balance on go-live split (typically 50/50). Where it does, that split governs payment for that job.
Monthly fee. Billed monthly from the day your site goes live. Standing instruction is GoCardless Direct Debit; card via Stripe is available on request.
Invoices and receipts. We issue an invoice or receipt for each payment — build fee and each monthly — to the email address on your order form.
Late payment. If a payment fails we'll let you know and try again. If it's still unpaid after the dunning steps in section 11, we'll suspend the site as described there. We don't levy late-payment interest as a matter of course, but reserve the right to recover reasonable collection costs, and any interest the law allows, on a debt that's seriously overdue.
4. Term, cancellation, and minimum commitment
Tier 1 is a one-off transaction: build, hand over the files, done. There's no rolling arrangement to cancel and no monthly to end.
Tiers 2–4 are rolling monthly arrangements — no fixed contract, no minimum initial term.
Notice (Tiers 2–4). Either of us can end the arrangement with 30 days' written notice (email is fine). Your final monthly payment covers the period up to the end of notice; we don't pro-rate. At the end of notice you take the built site with you — see section 12.
If you cancel after paying but before we start the full build — the build fee is refunded in full. Once the full build has started, the build fee is non-refundable, because it pays for time already spent. If you cancel part-way through, we may at our discretion refund a portion reflecting clearly-identifiable work not yet done. Where a deposit split applies, the deposit follows the same before/after-start rule and the balance is only due as your order form provides.
Add-ons. Some add-ons have their own terms (typically a longer minimum, because they involve real third-party costs). When they do, the add-on terms appear on the invoice or in a separate addendum and override anything in this section that conflicts.
If you're buying as a consumer. If you are an individual buying for purposes wholly or mainly outside your trade or business, you have a 14-day statutory right to cancel the contract under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. We'll send you the pre-contract information and a model cancellation form separately, before you sign. The contract sets out how that right works alongside the refund rules above (including the express “please start work now” option if you don't want to wait 14 days, and what you pay if you cancel after we've started).
5. What counts as a “minor change”
Your plan includes ongoing minor changes — the everyday stuff you'll want updated as your business changes. “Minor” means editing what's already there. For example:
- Updating opening hours, contact details, prices, or service descriptions.
- Swapping out a photo, a logo, or a piece of copy.
- Adding a few items to a list of services we already render on the page.
- Fixing typos and tightening copy you provide.
What it's not: building a new page, designing a new section, adding a new feature, integrating a new third-party tool. Those are scoped separately and quoted ahead of any work starting.
On the Premium tier some new-page work is included up to a stated cap; the exact number is on your invoice.
6. Support
Our normal hours are Monday to Friday, 9–5 UK time (GMT in winter / BST in summer). Outside those hours we'll see your message when we're next at the desk.
Tier 1 (Self-managed). You get a short handover document at delivery — everything you need to host the site yourself, point a domain at it, and make small content edits. There's no ongoing support included; any further work you'd like us to do after handover is scoped and quoted separately.
Tiers 2–4 each have a response-time target during business hours:
- Managed — reply within one working day.
- Managed + Insights — reply within one working day, faster on urgent issues.
- Premium — priority response target during business hours.
Any “priority” or “premium” framing on the marketing page means a fast response target. It does not mean we are staffing the inbox 24/7.
7. Your domain
Your domain is registered in your name, with you as the legal owner — not in ours. We'll help you set it up and manage the DNS for you while you're a client, but the registration belongs to you. If you leave, the domain stays with you.
Tier 1 (Self-managed): we cover the first year's registration as part of the build. Renewal from year two onwards is your responsibility — we'll note the renewal date on your handover so it's not a surprise.
Tiers 2–4: we cover the domain registration and renewals for as long as you're on the plan.
8. Your business email
If your plan includes business email (an address at your own domain), the mailbox is set up in your own provider account (typically Zoho, Microsoft 365, or similar) — in your name. We configure it, point the DNS at it, and can administer the account if you ask us to.
We don't read your mailbox contents.
Email service, deliverability, and uptime are the email provider's responsibility, not ours. We'll help diagnose problems, but we can't guarantee delivery of every message — mail routing is partly out of any one party's hands.
Because the mailbox is in your account, you're the data controller for your own correspondence. If you leave, the mailbox stays with you.
9. Hosting and uptime
We host your site on Cloudflare's edge network. In practice that's very fast and very reliable, but no host is up 100% of the time, and we don't guarantee a specific uptime number.
If the site is down because of something at our end (a config we shipped, a misrouted DNS change), we'll fix it as a priority and tell you what happened. If the cause is upstream (Cloudflare itself, a UK-wide ISP issue, a DNS provider outage), we'll let you know and pass on what we can.
10. AI-assisted monitoring
On Managed + Insights and Premium we run automated checks that watch your site for problems — things like the site going down, content getting broken, performance slipping, or unexpected changes appearing. We describe this as “AI-assisted monitoring”:
- It detects, monitors, and flags issues so we can act.
- It does not prevent issues, and we never describe your site as “secured” because of it.
- It runs read-only — it watches and reports; it does not write to or change your site.
If something is flagged that needs your input (e.g. content you provided is out of date), we'll let you know what we've seen and what we propose to do.
11. Non-payment process (Tiers 2–4)
This section covers monthly payment failure on Tiers 2–4. Tier 1 has no monthly to fail; non-payment of the build fee is handled per section 3 — we don't publish the site or hand over the files until it's cleared, and any refund follows the rules in section 4.
If a monthly payment fails, we work through these steps before anything visible happens:
- First failure. We email you to let you know and retry the payment.
- Second failure (~7 days). We send a clear reminder — what's overdue, how to fix it, and when the next step happens.
- Final notice (~14 days). A final email warning that the site will be suspended on the date we name unless payment clears.
- Suspension (~21 days). If the balance is still unpaid we serve a temporary 503 holding page from your domain — a polite “this site is temporarily unavailable” page, not an error. The domain still resolves; email still works; the site itself just isn't serving.
What we never do: redirect your domain elsewhere, touch your domain registration, transfer the domain out of your name, or delete your data. The suspension is reversible the moment the balance clears.
Once payment is cleared we lift the holding page the same working day.
12. When you leave
Tier 1 already has everything at delivery — the built site files, your domain in your name, your hosting account in your name. There's no “leaving” event because there was no ongoing relationship to end. If you come back later for more work (a redesign, a new section, a bug-fix), that's a fresh quote.
For Tiers 2–4, when notice is given (by either of us):
- You keep your domain, in your name, registered with whichever registrar it sat with on the day you signed up (or whichever one we moved it to with your permission). We'll hand over registrar login and authorisation codes.
- You keep your business email (if applicable), because it's in your own provider account.
- You keep the built site. At the end of the notice period we hand over the rendered HTML, CSS, images, and any copy we wrote for you — in a working state you can deploy to any static host. We include a short README with deployment steps. This is part of what the build fee bought; there's no separate “handover” charge.
- You also get an export of any content you provided to us — logos, photos, draft copy.
- We stop hosting the site at the end of the notice period.
If you'd like our help with the rehost itself (DNS pointing, push to your new host, smoke-test), that's optional and quoted separately — but the README and the files we hand over are enough to do it yourself or hand to another developer.
13. Ownership of the work
Your content stays yours. Anything you give us — your logo, photos, copy you wrote, brand assets — remains yours throughout and after. We don't claim rights over any of it.
The built site is yours. The rendered HTML, CSS, images, and any copy we wrote specifically for your site form the built instance, and that instance is yours under the build fee. Tier 1 receives the files at delivery; Tiers 2–4 receive them when the relationship ends (see section 12). Once you have the files you're free to use, modify, and host them on any platform of your choosing — including a redesign by another developer if that's where you end up.
Our framework stays ours. The reusable template, design system, and build pipeline behind your site — the layout patterns, the CSS architecture, the deployment tooling — is what we use to build every Beacon site. We retain ownership of that framework and keep using it on other client builds. Your built site is a specific instance of it; the framework itself isn't part of what you're buying.
Any copy we wrote specifically for your site is yours outright once the build fee has cleared — assigned to you under the contract, not just licensed. You can keep using it indefinitely, including after you take the files elsewhere.
14. Your responsibilities
To keep everything above true and clean, you agree that:
- You have the rights to use any logos, photos, text, or other content you send us — you own it or have a licence that allows commercial use on a public website.
- The information you give us about your business is accurate enough that we can build a site that represents it honestly.
- You won't ask us to publish content that's illegal, misleading, or that infringes someone else's rights.
If something gets flagged after the fact (a takedown request, a complaint), we'll let you know and work with you to fix it.
15. Liability
We'll always do our best, but plain English about limits:
- If we cause you a loss directly because of something we did wrong, our total liability for any twelve-month period is capped at the greater of (a) the total fees you paid us in that period or (b) £1,000. (For a typical Tier 2–4 client this means: the monthly fee × 12 plus any one-off fees, with the £1,000 floor protecting low-fee Tier 1 clients.)
- For business clients, we're not liable for indirect or consequential losses — lost profits, lost opportunity, lost goodwill, third-party fines, or anything similar.
- For consumer clients, your statutory rights are preserved — in particular the Consumer Rights Act 2015 implied terms about reasonable care and skill are not excluded, and any limit we describe applies only where the law allows.
- Nothing here limits liability for anything that can't legally be limited (e.g. death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, or other non-excludable liabilities).
16. Data protection
How we handle the personal data you give us through this site is set out in our Privacy notice. For client work, where we process personal data on your behalf (e.g. enquiries from your customers via a form on your site), the contract includes a full UK GDPR Article 28 data processing agreement as Schedule 2 — signed at the same time as the rest of the contract, not as a separate document later.
17. Changes to these terms
If we change these terms in a way that materially affects you, we'll email you the new version with at least 30 days' notice before they apply. Smaller wording changes — typos, clarifications — we'll update silently and bump the “Last updated” date at the top. Previous versions live in our public git history.
18. Law and where disputes are heard
These terms are governed by the laws of Scotland, and any dispute that can't be sorted out by email goes to the Scottish courts. We'd much rather sort things out by email.
19. Contact
Beacon Web Studio
Based in Fife, Scotland
hello@beaconwebstudio.uk