Terms of Service

1. Agreement to these Terms

By accessing or using elevarestudio.co (the “Site”), creating an account, or using any service from us (the “Services”), you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service and by our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated here by reference. If you do not agree, do not use the Site or the Services.

You confirm you are at least 18 years old and, if you are agreeing on behalf of a business or other entity, that you are authorized to bind it to these Terms.

A signed Client Agreement controls where it differs from these Terms. If we build and run a website for you, that engagement is governed by a separate written Client Agreement you sign. These Terms cover the Site and the general relationship; the Client Agreement covers your engagement, and it wins on any point where the two do not say the same thing.

2. What we offer

Elevare is a creative studio. We have one offer.

• Website build-and-run engagements. We design, build, host and run a custom website for an eligible business with no upfront cost and no monthly fee, and we invoice a percentage of the money that website takes (see Section 3). Included at no additional charge, for as long as the engagement is in force: the custom site, hosting, the domain registration, email forwarding on your domain, a support ticket tool, marketing creative on request, and unlimited changes (see Section 6).

What we do not do. We do not sell products on this Site. There is no package price list, no card payment page, no recurring plan and no digital download for sale. Any page, link, advertisement or email that offers you one of those is out of date; the current offer is the one on our pricing page.

Retired products. We previously sold one-time digital kits and fixed-price advertisement packages. Those are withdrawn and cannot be bought. If you bought one before it was withdrawn, what you received is still yours on the licence terms in Section 9, and the accuracy disclaimer in Section 8 still applies to it.

We may change or discontinue what we offer at any time. We will not charge you for anything you did not agree to in writing.

3. How we are paid

For a website build-and-run engagement, we are paid a percentage of the money that goes through the website we build and run for you: 10% of deposits (money taken online to hold a booking or appointment) and 5% of everything else the site takes. Both rates apply to the same business at once. A payment is classified once, when it is taken, and billed at exactly one of the two rates, never both.

• We bill you by invoice. We never deduct our fee from your payments. 100% of every payment your customers make lands in your own payment account, on your own payout schedule, in your own bank. No money passes through us at any point. After each month ends we send one invoice for the percentage, and you pay it from your own account like any other supplier bill.
• The percentage applies only to money that goes through the website we built. Cash, card in the shop, phone orders, and anything else you take in person or off the site is not counted and earns us nothing, even from the same customer on the same day.
• Billing starts at your first sale. A month in which the site makes no sales produces no invoice. There is no minimum, no monthly floor and no setup fee.
• We do not charge on refunds, chargebacks or voided payments, on sales tax you collect and remit, on shipping paid over to a carrier, or on tips paid out to your staff.
• Your own payment processor charges its own fees. Those are separate from ours, are governed by your agreement with that processor, and are not deducted before our percentage is calculated.
• The exact rates for your engagement, and the full terms including termination and buyout, are in your signed Client Agreement, which controls where it differs from these Terms.

4. Invoices and payment

• All amounts are in U.S. dollars.
• We invoice through Square, and Square is the only way we take money from you. We close each month’s figures after the month ends and send one invoice. We never charge a card on file, never take a payment you have not been invoiced for, and never hold or route your customers’ money. Your full card number never touches our servers.
• Every invoice shows its arithmetic. Each one is itemised by rate, with deposits and other transactions as separate lines, and ships with the underlying transaction list so you can check the number line by line.
• Invoices are due within 15 days of the invoice date.
• If you think an invoice is wrong, tell us. Write to us within 15 days of the invoice date, identifying the transactions in question, and we will work it out against the transaction list. The part you do not dispute stays due on time.
• Amounts more than 15 days past due accrue interest at 1% per month, or the highest rate allowed by law, whichever is lower.
• You are responsible for any taxes on what you buy from us and for any taxes owed on revenue your own business earns.
• Please raise a billing problem with us before disputing a payment with your bank. The written dispute window above is faster than a chargeback and does not put your site at risk.

5. Your payment processor, and our access to it

• The account is yours. You open, own and control your own payment account, in your own legal name. Most clients use their own Stripe account; another processor is fine if it can do what your site needs. You are the merchant of record: you sell to your customers, you are responsible for delivering what you sell, and you handle refunds, disputes and chargebacks, including their fees.
• Your money never comes to us. Your customers’ payments go straight into your own account, on your own payout schedule. We are not in that path and we never hold your funds.
• What we need. You add us to your own account with developer-level access, which lets us connect your site to it so it can take payments, and read what the site sold. We need it to build and run the site at all.
• We will not move your money. We will not initiate a payout, transfer, refund or charge in your account except at your specific written request and on your instructions.
• You agree to keep that access in place while the engagement is in force. If it is removed or breaks, we will tell you in writing and give you time to restore it before anything else happens. While we cannot see your site’s transactions we will not guess: we issue no invoice for that month until access is back, then invoice the actual figure with the transaction list.

6. Revision policy: changes are unlimited

This is the revision policy for a build-and-run engagement. Changes to your site are unlimited and free. There is no change-order fee, no per-edit charge and no revision count. Ask as often as you like.

Things that are changes, at no cost:

• New prices, new hours, new photos, new copy.
• A new service, a new product, a new page.
• Redesigning a section, changing the layout, changing colours or type.
• Seasonal promotions, banners and announcements.
• Fixing anything that is broken or wrong, including anything we got wrong.
• The first build. If you are not happy with the first version of your site, we revise it until you are. That is a change like any other, and changes are unlimited.

The one thing that is not a change: a genuinely new system. A new system is a substantial capability the site was not built to have. Examples: a native mobile app, an integration with another platform that has to be built from scratch, a custom inventory or payroll system, or a rebuild for multiple locations.

• New systems are quoted as separate flat-price projects, with a minimum price of $500. Below that minimum it is a change, and changes are unlimited and free.
• You always see the price first. Quoted work is written down, priced and approved by you in writing before any of it starts. Nothing outside the engagement begins without a price you have agreed to. We tell you before, never after.
• If we disagree about whether something is a change or a new system, we resolve it by quoting it. You are free to decline the quote. Declining a quote is never a breach of these Terms and never a reason for us to suspend or end your site.

How to ask, and when we start. Send changes through the support ticket tool included with your site. The times below are commitments about when we begin, not guaranteed fix times, because some causes sit with the host, your payment processor or the domain registrar rather than with us.

• Site down, or customers cannot pay or book: we begin within hours. Our target is 4 hours.
• Everything else: we begin within days. Our target is 2 business days. This covers content edits, new pages, design changes and questions.

7. Build timelines

We give you a delivery window for the first complete version of your site, and that window starts when you have sent us what we need, not when you sign. What we need is your content and prices, your photographs and logo files in usable resolution, the payment-account access in Section 5, and your answers to the intake form. If you send it in pieces, the clock starts when the last piece arrives. If you ask for a substantial change of direction after the window has started, it restarts from the date the new direction is settled. Estimated dates are given in good faith and are not guaranteed.

8. AI-assisted work: important disclaimer

We use artificial intelligence to help produce and refine our work, including site copy, marketing creative and any digital kit you may have bought from us in the past. You understand and agree that:

• AI-assisted output may contain errors, omissions, or inaccuracies, and may include figures, projections, market data, or claims that are estimates or illustrative only.
• The output is not legal, financial, tax, accounting, investment, or other professional advice, and is not a substitute for a qualified professional. You should independently verify any information before relying on it or acting on it.
• We make no guarantee of any business result (including any revenue, funding, ranking, traffic, sales, or other outcome) from the Services or their output.
• You are responsible for reviewing, correcting, and deciding how to use any deliverable, and for ensuring it is accurate and appropriate for your business before you rely on it or publish it.

9. Who owns what

This is stated plainly because it is never left for you to assume.

• We hold, while the engagement is in force: the domain name for your site, registered in our name and paid for by us; the hosting accounts and infrastructure the site runs on; and the code, design files and configuration of the site. That is how the build costs you nothing upfront. You have the right to use all of it for your own business for as long as the engagement is in force.
• You own, in your own name: your payment account and all the money in it; your Google Business Profile; your social media handles and accounts; your mailbox and email address; and your content, meaning your logo, brand, photographs, text and product information, which you licence to us only for building and running the site.
• Your customers’ data is yours. We hold it as your service provider under the data-protection terms attached to your Client Agreement, which also govern what happens to it when the engagement ends.
• You can buy the site outright. The buyout option and its price are in your signed Client Agreement.
• What we keep. We retain all rights in our own pre-existing and independently developed materials: component libraries, frameworks, templates, design systems, build tooling, prompts, methods and know-how. Nothing here transfers those to you. AI-generated elements may be similar to output provided to others; we do not warrant that any AI-generated element is unique or free of third-party rights, and you are responsible for clearing trademarks and other rights before commercial use.
• Previously purchased deliverables. If you bought a digital kit from us before those products were withdrawn, you keep a worldwide licence to use the deliverables we generated specifically for you, for your own business purposes.
• Portfolio and showcase licence. Unless we agree otherwise in writing, you grant us a non-exclusive licence to show work we produced for you, including your live site, in our portfolio, case studies and marketing, excluding your confidential information, your customers’ data and your non-public financial figures. Sites we build may carry a “Powered by ELEVARESTUDIO LLC” credit. You may withdraw this for future uses by written notice.
• You may not resell, redistribute, sublicense, or present our templates, tools, or methods as your own for resale.

10. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the Services for anything unlawful, or for a business that is prohibited or restricted by your own payment processor or by applicable law;
• submit content you do not have the rights to, or that infringes, defames, or violates anyone’s rights;
• attempt to breach, probe, overload, scrape, or interfere with the Site, our systems, or our security;
• reverse-engineer or misuse our tools, or use the Services to build a competing product from our templates or methods;
• share account access or deliverables with unauthorized parties.

You are responsible for keeping your account credentials secure and for all activity under your account.

11. Third-party services

The Services rely on third-party providers. We use Square to invoice you and to process your payment of our invoices; Supabase and Vercel for hosting, databases and account authentication; Resend for email; Meta for advertising measurement and social integrations; and Anthropic for the AI generation described in Section 8. Your use of those services through us may be subject to their own terms, and we are not responsible for their acts, omissions, availability, or fees. The full list, and what each one is used for, is in our Privacy Policy.

Your own payment processor is yours, not one of ours. The account that takes your customers’ money, typically your own Stripe account, is opened and held in your name under a contract between you and that processor. It handles your customers’ card data. We do not store full payment card details for you or for your customers.

12. Suspension and ending an engagement

Your signed Client Agreement sets out exactly how an engagement ends, and it controls. In summary, and so nothing here is a surprise:

• We do not take a site down without written notice and a chance to fix it. Unpaid invoices run through a written notice ladder with a cure period at every step before a site can be suspended, and suspension runs for a further period before an engagement can be terminated.
• Suspension deletes nothing. Your site, its content and your customers’ data are preserved, your domain is not released or transferred to anyone, your data stays available to you on request, and we restore the site when the arrears are paid, with no reinstatement fee.
• If the site sells nothing for three months, the arrangement ends. Three calendar months in a row with no sales through the site, counted from the day it goes live, and we part ways on 30 days’ written notice. A single sale resets the count to zero. At the end of the second empty month we write to you first, and we offer to help, because a site selling nothing usually has a fixable problem. A month in which we suspended the site, or it was down for a reason on our side, does not count as an empty month. Note that this clock and your billing start at different times: billing starts at your first sale, so a site that launches and sells nothing is never invoiced a cent and is still on this clock.
• You can leave. Notice periods scale with how long we have worked together and are set out in your Client Agreement. If we materially breach and do not fix it after written notice, you can leave immediately.
• You can buy the site outright, at any time. The price is whatever you owe us plus twelve months of fees, and your Client Agreement states how that is calculated and its minimum. On payment the domain transfers to a registrar account of your choosing, you get your data, and we help you move the site onto your own hosting. Buying is an option, not an obligation: choosing not to buy is never a breach.
• We will not hold your own accounts hostage. When an engagement ends we remove ourselves from your payment account, Google Business Profile, social accounts and any other account of yours, and return or destroy any credential of yours that we hold.
• For use of the Site outside an engagement, we may suspend or terminate access, with notice where reasonably practicable, if you breach these Terms, misuse the Services, or create legal or security risk. You may stop using the Site at any time.

Sections that by their nature should survive termination (including fees owed, intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and dispute resolution) survive.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Site, the Services, and all deliverables are provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement, and any warranty of accuracy, uptime, security, or results. We do not warrant that the Services will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any output will meet your requirements or produce any particular outcome. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranty exclusions, so some of the above may not apply to you.

14. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

• We will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any lost profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or business interruption, arising out of or relating to the Services, even if advised of the possibility.
• Our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the Services is limited to the amount you actually paid us in the three (3) months before the event giving rise to the claim. For a build-and-run engagement, the liability cap in your signed Client Agreement applies instead, and that Agreement states the cap in plain language, with a figure, at the front of the document. Read it there.
• We do not carry errors-and-omissions or cyber-liability insurance. There is no insurer standing behind these limits.
• Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law (such as, where applicable, liability for fraud, gross negligence, willful misconduct, or personal injury).

15. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless ELEVARESTUDIO LLC and its owner, members, and contractors from any claims, damages, losses, liabilities, and reasonable costs (including legal fees) arising out of or relating to: your business, products, services, offers, or claims; content you provide to us or publish using a deliverable; your use of AI-assisted output; your violation of these Terms, of law, or of a third party’s rights; and taxes owed on your revenue.

16. Your data and your customers’ data

What we collect, why, who we share it with, how long we keep it and what rights you have are set out in our Privacy Policy. Where we hold your customers’ data because we run your site, we hold it as your service provider on the data-protection terms attached to your Client Agreement, which also set out how long it is kept after an engagement ends.

17. Dispute resolution, arbitration, and class-action waiver

Please read this section carefully. It affects your legal rights.

• If you have signed a Client Agreement, its dispute clause controls your engagement, including its governing law and the forum where a dispute is heard. The rest of this Section applies to everything else, including use of the Site by someone who is not a client.
• Informal resolution first. Before starting any formal proceeding, you agree to contact us at owner@elevarestudio.co and give us at least 30 days to resolve the dispute in good faith.
• Binding arbitration. Any dispute that is not resolved informally will be settled by final and binding individual arbitration, rather than in court, except that either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court where it qualifies. Arbitration will be administered by a recognized arbitration provider under its consumer/commercial rules, and may be conducted by phone, video, or written submissions where allowed.
• Class-action and jury-trial waiver. Disputes will be brought only in your individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative action. You and Elevare each waive any right to a jury trial.
• Governing law and venue. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Connecticut, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. To the extent any dispute proceeds in court rather than arbitration, it will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Connecticut, and you consent to their jurisdiction.
• Time limit. Any claim relating to the Services must be brought within one (1) year after it arises, or it is permanently barred, to the extent permitted by law.
• If any part of this Section is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect; if the class-action waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim will proceed in court rather than arbitration.

18. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we do, we will change the “Last updated” date and version above. Material changes will be posted here, and your continued use of the Services after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms. We can never change the rates in your signed Client Agreement by updating this page. Those change only by written agreement between us, on the terms in that Agreement.

19. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and any separate written agreement you sign with us are the entire agreement between us for the Services and supersede prior discussions. Any earlier Elevare document describing our fee as deducted from your payments, taken out of your revenue, or split from what your site earns is superseded in full by Section 3. We bill by invoice, and only by invoice.
• Severability. If any provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in effect.
• No waiver. Our failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them to a successor or affiliate.
• Independent contractor. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, employment, or agency relationship.
• Electronic agreement. We transact electronically. An agreement accepted by clicking has the same effect as one signed by hand.

20. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Contact ELEVARESTUDIO LLC at owner@elevarestudio.co, 36 Russ Street, 3rd Floor #1448, Hartford, CT 06106.