the terms.

Kestrel is a small web studio in Vancouver, British Columbia, run by its founder as a sole proprietorship. “We” means Kestrel; “you” means the business we work with. You can reach us at hello@madebykestrel.com.

How we handle personal information, including the simple visit counts on this site, is in our privacy notice.

These terms apply when you use our website, ask for a website check, or buy anything from us. For a project, we’ll also confirm the details (what we’re building, your monthly pieces and prices) in writing before you pay.

When you ask for one, we look at your website and Google listing (on a phone) and send you a short written summary. It’s free and there’s no obligation. It’s our honest opinion based on what we can see publicly, not a full technical audit.

The launch price is a one-time $299 and includes:

• as many pages as your business needs to explain what you do (services, about, contact, menu, areas you cover and so on), designed and built by us;
• the words written by us, from a short call and your answers;
• a homepage preview before you pay, with a round of changes;
• going live on our hosting or on your own account, set up together;
• 30 days of small edits after you go live (see “unlimited small edits” below for what “small” means).

Not included in the $299, and always quoted first: online stores with more than 10 products, customer logins or accounts, custom apps or tools, moving lots of content from an old site, and work in more than one language.

We build your homepage first. If you don’t like it, you can walk away and owe nothing. Until the launch is paid, the preview and its design stay ours: please don’t copy or use them. You pay the $299 when you approve the site to go live. Big changes of direction after approval (a whole new design, a new kind of feature) are quoted first, and you decide.

After launch you can add monthly pieces (hosting, edit time, your Google profile, review requests, call tracking, booking and so on) at the prices on our pricing page. Each piece is month to month.

• Cancelling: tell us by email, and the piece ends 30 days later. No exit fee, no long contract.
• Unlimited small edits: for $10 a month, send as many small changes as you like: text, photos, prices, hours, a new menu item or service. Small means about 30 minutes of work or less each. We do them one request at a time, usually within 2 business days. Bigger jobs (a new page, a new feature, a redesign) are quoted first at $40 an hour, and you decide. A series of small requests that together add up to a bigger job is treated as one bigger job.
• Usage limits: call tracking and missed-call text-back include up to 500 call minutes a month. Above that, extra minutes are passed on at what they cost us. Review requests include up to 200 texts a month, on the same terms. We’ll tell you before any of that happens.
• Hosting: covers a normal small-business website. Unusual traffic, very large files (like long videos) or heavy storage are quoted separately.
• Payments and apps: we connect them once as part of the piece. Later changes count as small edits, or are quoted if they’re bigger.
• Other companies’ fees: things like your domain, Stripe’s fee per sale, or a paid app subscription are billed to you by that company directly. We never mark them up.
• Price changes: we’ll give you at least 30 days’ notice by email, so you can cancel first if you prefer.

We send invoices by email and you can pay online. Monthly pieces are billed at the start of each month. Prices are in Canadian dollars, and taxes (GST/PST) are added where they apply. If an invoice goes unpaid for more than 30 days, we may pause the monthly pieces it covers until it’s sorted; we’ll always tell you first.

Once the launch is paid, your website, its design and its code belong to you. Your domain is always registered in your name and account; we only ever get access you give us, and we never ask for your passwords.

You keep everything you give us (logo, photos, text). You confirm you have the right to use it, and you let us use it to build and run your site. Fonts, photos and tools from other companies stay under their own licences, which we choose so they’re fine for your business to use.

We’d love to show your site in our portfolio, but we only do that with your permission.

We build carefully, test on phones, and fix anything broken that’s our fault. But we can’t promise a ranking on Google, a number of calls or sales, or that a site will never be offline: hosting providers have outages too. On hosted sites, if your site goes down or your form stops working, we’ll respond the same business day.

If something goes wrong, our responsibility is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before. This doesn’t limit anything the law doesn’t allow us to limit.

You can leave whenever you like. Once any unpaid invoices are settled, we’ll hand over the full code, the built site, every photo and video we made for you, and a one-page guide to hosting it elsewhere. We move your domain settings back to your own account, remove our access, and confirm in writing.

We can stop a monthly piece or stop working together by giving you 30 days’ notice by email, and we’ll still hand everything over. We can stop straight away if invoices go unpaid for more than 60 days after a reminder, or if a site would be used for something illegal, harmful or misleading. We won’t publish content we believe breaks the law or someone else’s rights.

We may update these terms; the date at the top shows the latest version, and we’ll email clients about anything important. They’re governed by the laws of British Columbia and Canada. If we ever disagree, let’s talk first: email hello@madebykestrel.com.