Terms & Conditions

This website is operated by Pattern Aesthetic Limited, a company registered in England & Wales (company number 17312956), registered office 110b St. Johns Lane, Bristol, BS3 5AJ. In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" refer to Pattern Aesthetic Limited, and "you" refers to the person or organisation commissioning work from us.

1. What these terms cover

These terms govern the services we supply and the use of this website. Where we issue a signed proposal, statement of work or master services agreement, that document and these terms are read together; if they conflict, the signed document prevails on the point of conflict.

2. The services we provide

We are a software development studio. We supply discovery and specification work, web application development, iOS and Android application development, systems and API integration, cloud infrastructure and deployment work, legacy code audits, and ongoing support and maintenance under a monthly retainer.

Unless a proposal says otherwise, the following are not included: third-party licence and subscription fees, hosting and cloud usage charges, paid media, content writing, translation, photography, ongoing support after handover, and any hardware. Where we recommend a third-party service, you contract with that provider directly and on their terms.

3. How work is commissioned

You may enquire through the form on this website, by email to [email protected], or by telephone on +44 7473 990 855. Sending an enquiry places you under no obligation and creates no contract.

We then issue a written proposal setting out the scope, the price, the assumptions we have priced against and the timeline. A contract comes into existence when you accept that proposal in writing, or in the case of a signed statement of work when both parties have signed it. No payment is taken through this website; there is no checkout and we do not store card details.

4. Prices and quotations

The figures shown on this website are starting prices for guidance and are not offers. Our standard day rate is £695. All prices are quoted exclusive of VAT, which is added at the prevailing rate where chargeable.

A written quotation is valid for 30 days from its date. After that we may re-quote. Where a proposal is priced fixed-fee, that price holds for the scope described in it; work outside that scope is quoted separately and started only once you approve it in writing.

5. Payment terms

• Discovery engagements are invoiced in full in advance.
• Build engagements are invoiced 40% on commencement and the balance in equal instalments at the end of each two-week iteration, unless the proposal sets out a different schedule.
• Support retainers are invoiced monthly in advance.
• Invoices are payable within 14 days of the invoice date by bank transfer to the account shown on the invoice. We do not accept cash.

We may charge statutory interest and compensation on overdue commercial invoices under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, and may suspend work while an invoice is more than 14 days overdue. We will tell you before we suspend anything.

6. Delivery

Timelines in a proposal are estimates given in good faith and depend on you supplying what the proposal lists as your responsibility — access to systems, test data, decisions, and review of each iteration within five working days. Where a delay is caused by that material arriving late, dates move by at least the length of the delay and we will confirm the revised dates in writing.

Each two-week iteration ends with the software running on a staging environment you can access. Work is delivered on handover of the code repositories, documentation and infrastructure definitions described in the proposal.

7. Cancellation and your cooling-off right

If you are a consumer (contracting outside your trade, business or profession) and the contract was made at a distance or away from our premises, you have the right to cancel within 14 days of entering into it, under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. To cancel, email [email protected] — a clear statement is enough, and no reason is needed. If you asked us in writing to begin work during the cancellation period, you must pay for what was performed up to the moment you cancelled; if the service has been fully performed within that period at your express request, the right to cancel is lost.

If you are a business, either party may terminate an ongoing engagement on 30 days' written notice. Support retainers may be cancelled on 30 days' written notice to take effect at the end of a paid month. On termination you pay for work completed and for any commitments we have made on your behalf that cannot be cancelled.

8. Refunds

Where you cancel under the consumer right above and no work has begun, we refund in full within 14 days of being told, using the same payment method you used. Where work had begun at your request, we refund the balance after deducting the proportion performed.

If a deliverable does not conform to the agreed specification, tell us within 30 days of delivery and we will correct it at our cost. If we cannot correct it within a reasonable time, we refund the fee attributable to that deliverable. Nothing here affects your statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 if you are a consumer, including the right to services carried out with reasonable care and skill. We do not refund work that meets the specification because a business decision has changed.

9. Intellectual property

We retain ownership of all deliverables until we have been paid in full for them. On full payment, the intellectual property rights in the bespoke code, designs and documents made specifically for you transfer to you.

We keep ownership of our pre-existing tools, libraries, boilerplate and know-how, and of anything of general application we develop; where such material is embedded in a deliverable we grant you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to use it as part of that deliverable. Open-source components remain under their own licences, which we will list on request. You keep ownership of everything you supply us, and confirm you have the right to supply it.

Unless you tell us otherwise in writing, we may describe the work in general terms as a case study; we will not publish your data, source code or anything you have marked confidential.

10. Confidentiality

Each party keeps the other's confidential information confidential, uses it only for the engagement, and returns or destroys it on request. This does not apply to information that is public through no fault of the receiving party, or that the law requires to be disclosed. This obligation continues for three years after the engagement ends.

11. Liability

Our total liability arising out of or in connection with an engagement, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty or otherwise, is limited to the total fees you have paid us under that engagement in the 12 months before the claim arose.

We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of anticipated savings, loss or corruption of data where you have not maintained your own backups, or any indirect or consequential loss.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited — including, where you are a consumer, your statutory rights.

12. Resolving a disagreement

Raise the issue with us first, in writing to [email protected]. We acknowledge within two working days and aim to reply substantively within ten. If that does not settle it, both parties agree to attempt mediation through a CEDR-accredited mediator before starting court proceedings. Nothing prevents either party from seeking urgent injunctive relief at any time.

13. Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms and any dispute arising out of them are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

14. General

Neither party is liable for failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control, provided it tells the other promptly. If a clause is found unenforceable, the rest continue in force. A failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it. These terms, together with any signed proposal, are the entire agreement between us. We may update these terms; the version in force is the one published here when your contract was formed.