Terms of business

Last updated January 2026. In these terms “we” and “us” mean domcloud; “you” means the business engaging us.

1. Scope and quotes

Prices published on this site are the prices we charge for the scope described on the relevant service page. Before any work starts you get a written scope, price and date. If we have misjudged the effort involved, that is ours to absorb — the quoted price stands. If you change what you want, we quote the change before doing it.

Where a service page says something is not included, it is not included. We will tell you before starting if what you have asked for falls outside it.

2. Fees and payment

Recurring fees are paid monthly by card through Stripe. You set up the subscription when the engagement starts and it renews automatically each month until cancelled under clause 3 or 10. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach us.

One-off fees are paid against a Stripe payment link we send you. Work on a one-off engagement begins once that payment clears, unless we have agreed otherwise in writing.

Security questionnaire engagements are the exception: you pay on delivery. The payment link comes with the completed questionnaire, so nothing is due before you have the work in front of you. The AI assessment is not covered by this and is paid up front, because the refund is the promise and there has to be something to refund.

If a monthly payment fails, Stripe retries it automatically. Where it remains unpaid we will contact you before suspending anything — services are not cut off without notice.

Prices are quoted and invoiced in the currency you select, and each currency is priced independently rather than converted at the day’s exchange rate.

All prices are shown excluding VAT. The VAT that applies depends on where you are and whether you are VAT-registered, so the amount added at checkout varies by customer:

• Ireland: Irish VAT is added at the applicable rate.
• Elsewhere in the EU, business customers: where you provide a valid VAT number that we can verify, no VAT is charged and the reverse charge applies — you account for it in your own country.
• Elsewhere in the EU, without a valid VAT number: VAT is charged at your country’s rate.
• Outside the EU: normally no EU VAT is charged, though you may have local tax obligations of your own.

You are responsible for giving us accurate VAT status and location details. If they turn out to be wrong, any tax, interest or penalty arising from that is yours rather than ours.

3. Monthly services

The website, the AI receptionist, invoice chasing and any application we run for you are all monthly. What you own, and what happens when the arrangement ends, differs between them, so each is set out separately.

3.1 Websites

A one-off setup charge, then a monthly fee, with no minimum term. The setup charge is payable once at the start and applies whether you then pay monthly or yearly, because it buys the build and the build happens either way. The recurring fee covers the search work described in your quote, hosting, monitoring, the updates that keep the site secure, the ordinary upkeep of its content, and a monthly report. You may pay for a year up front at the published yearly price instead of monthly.

• You own the site. On termination it is yours, including the code and the content. If you ask for the files, you get the files.
• No exit fee and no notice period. Cancel and the next payment does not happen. There is no handover, migration or export charge at any point, and no final invoice for leaving.
• Paid yearly is paid in advance. If you cancel part-way through a year you have paid for, we refund the unused whole months. We do not keep money for months in which we did no work.
• Ordinary upkeep is included; a rebuild is not. Copy edits, new photos, hours, prices and a new service page are covered. A redesign or a new feature is quoted separately, and we tell you which one you are asking for before doing the work.
• The search work is what your quote says it is. Setting up and filling in your Google Business Profile is included. Review generation — contacting your past customers to ask for reviews — is a separate engagement and is not part of this unless your quote says so.
• We do not guarantee rankings, traffic or positions, and nobody honestly can. See section 8.4.
• Web applications — accounts, portals, payments, uploads, integrations — are not covered by this fee. They are quoted as a project and then run on a monthly fee agreed for that build, on the terms in 3.2.
• Domains and email are quoted separately and, where they are in your name, remain yours throughout.
• Review generation, where you do buy it, follows the review platform’s own policies. We will not incentivise reviews or filter out unfavourable ones, because doing so risks your listing being penalised.

3.2 Web applications

Applications we build and run — accounts, portals, payments, uploads — are quoted as a project and then run on a monthly fee agreed for that build, with a minimum term stated in your quote, no exit fee, and no notice period once that term has passed.

• You own what we build. On termination it is yours, including the code and content.
• After the minimum term you can cancel whenever you like. The subscription continues month to month, and cancelling stops the next payment. We do not ask for notice, and there is no exit fee, no handover charge and no final invoice for leaving.

3.3 The AI receptionist

• Minimum term is three months where a setup fee is paid and six where it is not, and the exact term is stated in your quote before you commit.
• Each tier includes a stated number of conversation minutes, and the rate beyond them is published. Minutes are counted on connected conversations only — we do not bill for ringing, for a call that reaches no one, or for a call our system fails to handle. Usage is visible to you during the month rather than at the end of it, and where you are consistently over we will tell you that the next tier is cheaper for you than the overage.
• The leads, transcripts and recordings are yours. We export them to you on request at any time, and on termination, at no charge.
• Your telephone number remains yours. Where calls are routed to us, that routing reverts to you on termination. There is no exit fee, handover charge or porting charge.
• It identifies itself as an assistant when asked. We will not configure it to state or imply that it is a person, and we will not accept an instruction to do so.
• It will not quote or commit you to a price unless you have given us a rate card in writing and asked us to. What it may say about your prices, availability and coverage is configured from what you tell us, and it is your responsibility to keep that current.
• Call recording, message content and retention are configured to the notice and consent requirements you confirm apply to you. Where that is unclear, we configure the stricter option rather than assume the looser one.
• You can suspend it at any time, and every conversation is retained so you can see what it said. Clause 8.5 sets out how responsibility for its output is allocated, and it is written for a system that answers without waiting for you.

3.4 Invoice chasing

• We are not a debt collection agency and do not act as one. We contact your customers as your business, in your name, from your address — chasing your own invoices the way you would. We never take assignment of a debt, never buy one, and never present ourselves as collectors.
• There is no physical collection of any kind. Nobody attends an address, ever, under any circumstances. Not the debtor’s home, not their business, not a site. Contact is by email, text message, telephone and posted letter only — letters go through the post like any other letter and are never hand-delivered — and this is not a limit we will lift on request. Irish law permits a visit where the debtor has agreed to one; we do not make them at all, which is a deliberately stronger position than the one the law requires.
• We contact the debtor and nobody else. Never their employer, their neighbours, their family, another contractor on the same site, or anyone else who might apply pressure on your behalf. Disclosing a debt to a third party is both a serious breach of trust and, in Ireland, conduct that can constitute harassment.
• Contact happens at reasonable hours and at a stated frequency. No calls in the evening, at weekends or on public holidays, and the escalation is spaced over weeks rather than repeated until someone gives in. Under the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997, demands for payment made at a frequency calculated to cause alarm, distress or humiliation are a criminal offence in Ireland. The published schedule exists so that the pace of contact is a matter of record rather than of anyone’s judgement on the day.
• No enforcement, no legal process, no credit reporting. We do not instruct bailiffs or sheriffs, issue proceedings, send anything purporting to come from a solicitor, or register a default against anyone. Where an invoice needs one of those, we will tell you so rather than attempt it.
• Escalation beyond chasing is a hand-off, not a further step we take. Where an account has passed the point at which contact from you is going to recover it, we say so and return it with the full contact history. Our preference is that you instruct a debt collection agency local to you, and you instruct them directly: we do not act as one, do not appoint one on your behalf, and are not a party to whatever you agree with them.
• Chasing stops immediately when the invoice is paid, a payment date is agreed, your customer disputes the work, or you ask us to stop. A disputed invoice is returned to you, because a dispute is a question about the work rather than the payment.
• You confirm the debt is genuinely owed and undisputed before we chase it, and that the contact details you give us may lawfully be used for that purpose. We rely on both.
• The monthly fee covers up to ten accounts. An account is one of your customers, regardless of how many unpaid invoices they hold. Contact within an account is not metered — the schedule decides how much of it there is. Accounts beyond the tenth in a month are quoted before any of them is worked, never added to an invoice after the fact.

4. AI assessment and the refund

The assessment fee is refunded in full if we cannot identify at least five hours per week of work that can be automated. The refund is conditional on identifying the opportunity, not on savings you realise afterwards — building the automation is a separate engagement, quoted separately.

The baseline is agreed in writing before work starts, either measured jointly or provided by you. The written finding sets out that baseline, the proposed automation and the expected saving.

5. Security questionnaires and security work

We draft answers from the controls and evidence you actually have. You review and submit them, and you remain responsible for the accuracy of what you submit to your customer.

We are not a certification body and cannot issue certifications. We do not carry out accredited penetration testing. Where a questionnaire answer would be untrue, we will tell you rather than write it.

6. Your responsibilities

We rely on the information you give us being accurate and on getting timely access to the people and systems needed. Where a deadline depends on your input we will say so, and a delay on your side moves the date.

7. Intellectual property

On payment, work produced specifically for you is yours — site code and content, policies, questionnaire answer libraries and automations, with the documentation to operate them. We keep ownership of our own pre-existing tools and methods, and of anything generic we reuse across clients.

8. Liability

This clause is deliberately detailed. It is meant to be read before you engage us, not after something goes wrong.

8.1 These terms are for business customers

We contract only with customers acting for purposes relating to their trade, business or profession. We do not provide these services to consumers, and nothing here is intended to affect rights that consumer law would give a consumer.

8.2 Cap on our liability

Our total liability to you for all claims arising from or connected to an engagement, whether in contract, in tort, for negligence, for breach of statutory duty or otherwise, is limited in aggregate to the fees you actually paid us for that engagement in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Any claim must be brought within twelve months of the date you became aware, or reasonably ought to have become aware, of the circumstances giving rise to it.

8.3 Losses we exclude entirely

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any of the following, however caused and even if we were told they were possible:

• loss of profit, revenue, turnover, sales, contracts or business opportunity;
• loss of anticipated savings, including savings we estimated in an assessment;
• loss of goodwill, reputation or business relationships;
• loss of, or corruption or unavailability of, data;
• wasted management or staff time;
• any indirect, consequential, special or incidental loss, and any pure economic loss;
• fines, penalties or regulatory sanctions imposed on you, other than where they result directly from our own wilful misconduct.

8.4 Websites, search visibility and third-party platforms

We build and maintain the site. We do not control who finds it, and we accept no liability for:

• search rankings, traffic, enquiries, leads, conversions, bookings or revenue. These depend on your market, your competitors, your pricing and your own follow-up. Nothing we say about SEO is a promise of position or volume, and no figure we discuss is a forecast you may rely on;
• decisions made by Google or any other platform, including ranking or algorithm changes, manual actions, suspension or removal of a Business Profile or listing, or the removal, withholding or non-appearance of reviews;
• failures, changes, price changes, deprecation or discontinuation of any third-party service the site depends on, including hosting, CDN, domain registration, email, analytics, payment providers and APIs;
• availability. We do not offer an uptime guarantee or service credits, and we are not liable for downtime, degraded performance or data loss at a hosting or platform provider;
• content, images, claims, prices or credentials you supply or approve. You are responsible for their accuracy, for holding the rights to use them, and for their compliance with advertising, professional and licensing rules that apply to your sector;
• vulnerabilities introduced after handover, or arising from software you or a third party adds, or from your failure to apply an update we have recommended.

8.5 AI assessments, suggestions and automations

This is the area where expectations most need to be explicit, so read it carefully.

• Everything we produce in an AI assessment is a suggestion, not advice you may act on unchecked. It is an opinion about where automation may help, informed by what you told us, and it is for you to evaluate before acting.
• AI systems are probabilistic and will sometimes be wrong. They can produce output that is inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, biased, or confidently fabricated. That is a property of the technology, not a defect in our work, and we do not warrant that any output is accurate, complete or fit for a particular purpose.
• Human review is a condition of use. Any automation we build must be reviewed by a competent person in your organisation before its output is relied on, sent to a third party, or used to make a decision about a person. If you choose to remove that review, the consequences are yours.
• The AI receptionist is the deliberate exception, and you accept it as such. It answers callers and sends follow-up messages without waiting for anyone to check them first — that is the service, not a lapse in it, and pre-send review is therefore not available for it. What replaces that review is the configuration you approve before it goes live, a transcript of every conversation, and your ability to suspend it at any moment. Within those limits you accept that it will sometimes say something wrong to a customer, and the allocation of responsibility in this clause 8.5 applies to what it says exactly as it does to any other automation.
• You remain the decision-maker. We are not liable for any decision you take, action you omit, communication you send or commitment you make on the basis of AI output — including anything sent to your customers, staff, insurers, auditors or regulators.
• Estimated time savings are estimates. The refund described in clause 4 is the whole of your remedy if we cannot identify a saving. We do not guarantee that any saving is realised, or that it persists, and we are not liable if it is not.
• Model providers change beneath us. We are not liable for changes in a model’s behaviour, quality, availability, terms or pricing, nor for a provider deprecating a model or suspending your access.
• You control what goes in. You are responsible for the data you or your automation submit to an AI provider, for having the right to submit it, and for any personal, confidential, special-category or regulated data it contains.
• Regulated and high-stakes uses are your responsibility. Where an automation touches employment, credit, insurance, health, safety, legal advice or any other regulated decision, you are responsible for the lawfulness of that use, including any obligations under the EU AI Act and data protection law, and for any human oversight, notice or record-keeping those require.
• Output is not professional advice. Nothing we or an automation produces is legal, accounting, tax, medical, engineering or other professional advice.

8.6 Security questionnaires and security work

• We draft answers from the controls and evidence you tell us you have. You review, approve and submit them, and you are responsible for their accuracy and for anything you represent to your customer.
• We do not warrant that you will pass an assessment, win or retain a contract, or achieve any certification. That decision belongs to your customer or a certification body.
• Our work is not an assurance that your systems are secure. A review is limited to the scope, time and information available, and cannot be relied on as evidence that no vulnerability exists. We are not liable for a security incident, breach or data loss affecting you.
• We are not a certification body and do not carry out accredited penetration testing.

8.7 What we do not and cannot exclude

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for wilful misconduct, or for anything else that applicable law does not permit to be limited or excluded. Where any part of this clause is found unenforceable, the remainder continues to apply.

9. Data protection

On invoice chasing and the AI receptionist you send us personal data about other people — your customers, or the people who ring you. For that data you are the controller and we are the processor: it stays yours, we act on your instructions, and it is not ours to do anything else with. This section is the written agreement GDPR requires between us for it.

• We process it only to do the job you asked for, on your instructions. Nothing in your ledger is used for our own purposes, for marketing, for training a model, or for any other client.
• We never sell it and we never share it. It is not passed to a debt collection agency, a credit reference agency, a data broker or anyone else. If an account needs an agency, we hand it back to you and you instruct them directly — see 3.4.
• We do not contact your customers for any purpose other than chasing the invoices you gave us. Not to sell them anything, and not to sell them anything of ours.
• We do not take access to your accounting system. We work from an export you produced, so you always know exactly what we hold.
• We delete it within 30 days of the engagement ending, and we return the full contact log to you before we do. If you ask us to delete an individual account’s data sooner, we do that too. The only things kept beyond that are our own invoices to you, which we are required to retain for tax purposes and which contain no data about your customers.
• Anyone who works on your ledger is bound to confidentiality on the same terms we are.
• We use a small, named set of providers to run the service, set out in our privacy notice. We will tell you before adding one that would process your data, and you may object.
• If you get a request from one of your customers — access, correction, erasure, or an objection to being contacted — we help you answer it and act on what you decide, promptly and at no charge.
• If anything goes wrong we tell you within 24 hours of becoming aware of it, with what we know at that point, so you can meet your own notification obligations rather than hearing about it late.
• You confirm you are entitled to give us the data and that contacting those customers about these invoices is lawful. You know your relationship with them; we do not.

10. Confidentiality

Security work in particular means seeing how your systems are built. We treat what we see as confidential, and we will not name you as a client or describe your work publicly without your written permission.

11. Termination

Either of us may end an engagement in writing. You pay for work completed up to that point; we hand over everything you own, at no charge.

12. Governing law and jurisdiction

We are established in Ireland, at Youghals House, Clonakilty, Co. Cork. These terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or their subject matter, are governed by Irish law, and the Irish courts have exclusive jurisdiction.

Where mandatory provisions of the law of your own country apply to you and cannot be displaced by agreement, this clause does not attempt to displace them.

Questions

Ask before signing rather than after: support@domcloud.app.