Terms of Service

These Terms of Service form a binding agreement between you and THESOFTKING Limited. They apply the moment you use our website, open an account, accept a proposal, place an order or start receiving work from us. Whichever of those happens first is the moment you are bound.

If you do not accept these terms, you are not permitted to use our website or engage our services. There is no partial acceptance. Take the time to read them properly before you sign anything, because "I did not read it" has never been a defence anywhere.

Where you have signed a separate written contract, statement of work or master services agreement with us, that document governs anything it addresses, and these terms fill in everything it does not. If the two genuinely conflict, the signed contract wins.

Our Privacy Policy and Refund Policy are part of this agreement and are worth reading alongside it.

THESOFTKING Limited is a software engineering and digital product agency, building for clients since 2011. In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean THESOFTKING Limited. "You", "your" and "Client" mean the person or company engaging us or using the website.

A few words we use often

• Services. Design, development, quality assurance, infrastructure, security, consultancy, maintenance and anything else we agree to perform for you.
• Products. Ready-made items we sell rather than build to order: scripts, templates, plugins, applications and similar.
• Deliverables. The specific things we hand over under an agreed scope, such as source code, designs, documentation and configuration.
• Client Materials. Anything you give us to do the work: content, logos, credentials, data, licences and third-party assets.
• Scope. The written description of what we agreed to do, usually a proposal, quotation or statement of work.

You must be at least 18 and legally able to enter a contract. If you are signing for a company, you are confirming you have the authority to bind it. The details you give us need to be accurate and kept current, because we rely on them for invoicing, licensing and delivery.

• Your password is yours to protect. Do not share it, and do not reuse one from somewhere else.
• Everything done through your account is treated as done by you, including anything a colleague, employee or contractor does with access you gave them.
• Tell us straight away at support@thesoftking.com if you think your account has been used by someone who should not have it. We will act quickly, but we cannot undo what happened before you told us.
• Pick a username that is lawful and not misleading. Impersonating a person or company, using someone else's trademark, or anything offensive or obscene will be removed.

Accounts built on false information, or used in breach of these terms, can be suspended or closed. Section 18 covers how that works.

We work in two ways, and it matters which one you are buying, because the terms differ.

The work is done by our own in-house team. Where a specialist subcontractor makes sense, we may use one, but we stay responsible to you for their work exactly as if we had done it ourselves.

We can decline work, and sometimes do. A handful of countries are outside what we can serve for legal or payment reasons, and we will tell you promptly if yours is one of them rather than take your money and stall.

Every engagement starts with a written scope. It says what we are building, what we are not building, what it costs, and roughly when it lands. Nothing outside that document is included, however reasonable it might sound in a meeting.

Quotations are valid for 30 days unless the document says otherwise. Timelines are estimates made in good faith on the assumption that you come back to us when we need you. They move if you do not.

We do not act on verbal instructions for anything that changes cost, scope or deadline. Email is fine. A message in the project channel is fine. A conversation nobody wrote down is not.

Projects stall for the same handful of reasons, and almost all of them are avoidable. To keep yours moving:

• Give us content, assets, credentials and third-party access when we ask, not weeks later.
• Name one person who can make decisions. Feedback from six people who disagree with each other is not feedback.
• Review what we send within the agreed window. Where no window is agreed, five business days is the default, after which we treat silence as approval and move on.
• Make sure you actually have the rights to the content, fonts, images, data and licences you hand us. We take you at your word on that.
• Keep your own backups of anything you cannot afford to lose.
• Pay invoices when they fall due.

Where a delay is on your side, deadlines shift accordingly and we are not liable for the knock-on effects. If a project goes quiet for more than 30 days we may park it and charge a reasonable remobilisation fee to pick it back up, because the team assigned to you gets reassigned in the meantime.

• Deposit. Project work normally starts on an advance payment. We do not begin until it clears.
• Milestones. Longer engagements are invoiced against agreed milestones or monthly, whichever the scope specifies.
• Due date. Invoices are payable within the period stated on them. Where none is stated, 7 days from the invoice date.
• Taxes and charges. Prices exclude VAT, sales tax, withholding tax, bank charges and currency conversion costs. Those are yours to cover.
• Third-party costs. Hosting, domains, licences, API usage, app store fees and similar are billed to you at cost unless the scope says they are included.
• Late payment. Overdue accounts may attract interest at the rate permitted by law, and we may pause work until the balance clears.

Fees already paid are handled under our Refund Policy. Deposits cover work already scheduled and resourced, so they are generally not refundable once we have started.

Please raise any dispute about an invoice within 10 days of receiving it, with the specific line you disagree with. We would much rather sort it out with you directly than have it turn into a chargeback, which helps nobody and costs us both more.

We test everything before it reaches you, and we still expect you to test it too. You know your business and your users better than we ever will.

When we deliver, you have the review window in the scope, or 7 days if none is stated, to come back with anything that does not match what was agreed. We fix those at no charge. If the window passes without a response, the delivery counts as accepted and later requests become change requests.

Bear in mind the difference between a defect and a preference. Something that does not do what the scope said is a defect and we own it. Something that works exactly as specified but you have since changed your mind about is a change request, and Section 05 applies.

We build against current, supported versions of browsers, devices, frameworks and platforms. Legacy or end-of-life environments are only supported when the scope explicitly says so.

There are some sensible carve-outs:

• Our pre-existing tools. Frameworks, libraries, boilerplate and internal components we built before your project, or use across many clients, stay ours. You get a perpetual, non-exclusive licence to use them as part of your deliverables, which is all you need.
• Open source. Third-party open source components keep their own licences and we cannot change that.
• Client Materials. Everything you gave us stays yours throughout, and you grant us the licence needed to use it while we do the work.
• Our brand. The THESOFTKING name, logo, website content and trade dress remain ours and may not be used without our written consent.
• Portfolio rights. Unless you tell us otherwise in writing, we may name you as a client and show the work in our portfolio and case studies. Confidential details stay confidential. Ask us to keep a project private and we will.

Ready-made products work differently from custom work. Buying one gets you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable licence to use it. It does not make you the owner, and it does not transfer any intellectual property.

What the licence allows

• Use the product for the number of installations, domains or end users your purchase covers.
• Modify it for your own use, subject to Section 12.

What it does not allow

• Reselling, redistributing, sublicensing or repackaging it, in whole or in part.
• Sharing your licence, download files or account with anyone outside your organisation.
• Removing or obscuring copyright notices, licence keys or attribution.
• Using it to build a competing product for sale.

Breach any of that and the licence ends immediately, with no refund. You would then need to stop using the product and delete every copy.

Support runs through our ticket portal and support channels. We normally reply within 6 to 24 hours on business days. Urgent production incidents get looked at faster, though a guaranteed response time only exists where you hold a maintenance or SLA agreement with us.

Included

• Fixing defects in what we delivered, within the warranty period in Section 15.
• Questions about how to use or configure what we built.
• Installation help for standard cPanel-based hosting.

Not included, unless separately agreed

• New features, redesigns or scope additions.
• Problems caused by your hosting, your third-party services, or changes made by someone else.
• Training your team, migrating servers, or ongoing content updates.
• Support for products past their stated support window.

You are free to modify what we deliver. It is yours, or licensed to you, and we are not going to police it. Two things follow from that, though.

First, once you or another developer changes the code, our support for the modified parts stops. We cannot warrant work we did not write, and diagnosing someone else's changes is chargeable consultancy rather than support.

Second, please read the documentation before you start, and ask your support contact whether there is a cleaner way to get what you want. It is usually a five minute conversation that saves a fortnight of untangling.

Where a modification breaks something, we can quote to repair it. What we will not do is treat it as a warranty claim.

You may not use our website, products or services for anything unlawful, or in breach of the laws of your own jurisdiction, of the European Union, or of any other law that applies. In particular, our work may not be used for or alongside:

• Violence, terrorism, or incitement to either.
• Hard pornography or any sexual content involving minors.
• Racism, hate speech or harassment of a person or group.
• Pirated software, cracks, warez links or circumvention tools.
• Fraud, phishing, malware, spam or unsolicited bulk messaging.
• Scraping, reverse engineering or attacking our systems or anyone else's.

You also may not reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell or resell any part of our platform or services without our written permission.

If we find out any of this is happening, we will suspend the account immediately rather than open a discussion about it. Where the law requires us to report something, we will.

Both sides will inevitably see things the other would rather keep quiet: business plans, pricing, source code, customer lists, roadmaps. None of that gets disclosed to anyone else or used for anything beyond the engagement.

Our team and contractors are bound by confidentiality obligations that continue after they stop working with us. These duties survive the end of this agreement. A separate NDA is available whenever you want one, and we sign them as a matter of routine.

The usual exceptions apply: information that is already public through no fault of the receiver, was already known before disclosure, was independently developed, or must be disclosed by law. In that last case we will tell you first wherever we are legally allowed to.

How we handle personal data specifically is set out in our Privacy Policy.

We warrant that our work will be performed with reasonable skill and care by people competent to do it, and that deliverables will materially match the agreed scope at the point of delivery.

Defects reported within 30 days of delivery, or the period stated in your contract, get fixed at no cost. That is the warranty, and it is a real one.

Beyond that, the honest limits

Products and services are otherwise provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement or uninterrupted operation. Specifically, we do not warrant that:

• The service will run uninterrupted, secure, or be available at any particular time or place.
• Every error or defect will be found and corrected.
• The service is free of viruses or other harmful components.
• The results will meet your commercial expectations. We can build what was agreed. We cannot promise it will make you money.

We design for current technology and test before delivery. Compatibility with older or unsupported environments is not something we can guarantee.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, including lost data, lost profit, lost revenue, lost business opportunity, or losses arising from using or being unable to use what we provided.

Our total liability for any claim connected to an engagement is capped at the amount you actually paid us for that engagement in the 12 months before the claim arose.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including death or personal injury caused by negligence, and fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Where that is the case, our liability is limited to the smallest amount the law permits.

You agree to cover us against claims, damages and reasonable legal costs arising from your use of what we provided, your breach of these terms, or content and materials you supplied that turn out to infringe someone else's rights.

That last one is the common case. If you hand us an image, font, dataset or piece of code you did not have the right to use, and the owner comes looking, that is yours to answer for rather than ours.

When we can suspend or terminate

• Invoices go unpaid past their due date.
• These terms are breached, particularly Section 13.
• Your use puts our systems, our other clients or us at legal risk.
• The relationship has broken down to the point where the work cannot sensibly continue.

Serious breaches, especially unlawful use, we act on immediately and without notice. For everything else we will raise it with you first and give a fair chance to put it right.

If you want to end things

For an account, stop using it and ask us to close it. For an ongoing project, give us written notice. You remain liable for work completed and costs already committed up to that date, and we will invoice for those and hand over what has been paid for.

Termination does not wipe the slate. Ownership, confidentiality, warranty disclaimers, indemnity, liability limits and anything else that by its nature should continue, does continue.

Our team is the whole business, and training them takes years. While we are working together, and for 12 months afterwards, please do not directly solicit or hire someone who worked on your project without agreeing it with us first.

This is not about trapping anyone. If one of our people genuinely wants to join you, come and talk to us and we will usually find a way to make it work properly, with a recruitment fee, rather than have it happen behind our backs. General job adverts that anyone can apply to are entirely fine and not caught by this.

Our website and the things we build often connect to services we do not own: payment gateways, hosting providers, APIs, analytics, plugins, social platforms. Each runs on its own terms and its own privacy policy, and each can change or disappear without consulting us.

We have no control over those services and take no responsibility for their content, practices, uptime or pricing. Where a third party breaks or changes something and it affects work we built, fixing it is chargeable, because the cause sits outside anything we can warrant.

Neither side is liable for failing to perform when something genuinely outside its control gets in the way: natural disaster, war, civil unrest, epidemic, government action, strike, sustained power or internet failure, or a major cyberattack on infrastructure we depend on.

When that happens, obligations pause rather than vanish. We will tell you as soon as we reasonably can and pick things up once the situation clears. If it drags on beyond 60 days, either of us may end the affected engagement, settling up for work already done.

This agreement is governed by the laws of Bangladesh, where our headquarters sits, unless your signed contract with us names a different jurisdiction. The courts of Dhaka have jurisdiction, without prejudice to any mandatory consumer protection you have where you live.

Before anyone involves lawyers

Email support@thesoftking.com setting out the problem and what you want done about it. We commit to responding within 10 business days and to a genuine attempt at resolving it through discussion. Most disagreements are a misunderstanding about scope, and most of those get sorted in a single call.

If these terms are translated, the English version governs. Should any provision turn out to be unenforceable, the rest stands and that provision is read down to the narrowest form that works.

We update these terms as our services change and as the law moves. Whatever is published on this page is the version in force.

For material changes we will give reasonable notice before they take effect, by email or a notice on the site. Carrying on using our website or services afterwards means you accept the revised terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the services.

Work already under a signed contract or an accepted scope continues on the terms that applied when you agreed it. We do not change the deal midway through a project.

Something here unclear, or want a point confirmed in writing before you commit? Ask. We would rather spend ten minutes on it now than argue about it later.

Support and project matters: support@thesoftking.com
New enquiries: hello@thesoftking.com