What the monthly fee pays for, and what stays yours
CHF 300 a month pays for our work on your website, not for permission to use it. After the contract ends, the site is still yours to use and to change.
A company website from us has two prices: a fixed amount once, and CHF 300 a month. We have been asked more than once what happens to the website if the monthly contract ends. The short answer: it keeps working, and it stays yours to use.
What each price pays for
The fixed price pays for the website: the analysis of what you have, the prototypes, the design, the code and the content we build with you. It is paid in two halves, the first when the contract is signed and the second at acceptance.
The monthly fee pays for our work afterwards: running the site on our servers, keeping every component up to date, making the changes you ask for, measuring availability and answering when something is unclear. It is not a licence fee. You do not pay us every month for permission to use your own website.
What happens when the contract ends
You may keep using the website for your own purposes, for as long as you want. You may change it yourself, or have another company change it, and you may run it with a provider of your choice. We hand over what is needed for that. And if you later want us to run it again, a new contract is possible at any time, on the same terms as for any client.
What stays with us is the copyright in the source code and in reusable parts such as our design system. In practice that means two things: you cannot sell the code to others as a product of your own, and we may use the same building blocks for other clients, never your content. Your texts, pictures and logo are and remain yours.
Why we do it this way
Many agencies tie the website to the hosting contract: stop paying and the site goes dark, or the code is not handed over. That makes leaving expensive, which is exactly why it is common. We would rather keep clients because the work is good. A client who knows they can leave at any time judges the monthly fee by what it delivers, and that is the standard we want to be measured by.
Where it is written down
The price page on websites.elchi.dev says it from this week. Our general terms follow in version 1.6, with the permanent right of use in clause 10.2. For running contracts the new clause applies once it has been announced as our terms require.
Written by Samuel Krauss, Founder. Filed under websites, contracts.