Most studio guarantees live on a marketing page and die in the contract. Ours are the other way around. Every promise on this page is a clause on every MSA we’ve signed since 2019, with named recourse if it’s broken. No fine print, no asterisks, no “subject to circumstance.”
The headlines below are the seven promises in the MSA Annex. Underneath each one is the actual practice, and underneath that is what you get if we miss it. No clever wording. No “reasonable efforts.”
Schema, auth, payments, infrastructure: only senior engineers, with seven plus years of production experience. No juniors writing the foundations of your build. The senior who joins your first call is the same senior who reviews every PR on the spine. No rotation, no offshore handoff.
Recourse: if we ever assign a junior to a spine-tagged surface, you can cancel the engagement with full refund of unpaid work, and we’ll deliver a written explanation inside 7 days.
Every build opens with an architecture week. Mohit and a principal engineer read what exists, draw the system as it should be, write the trade-offs down, and make the call with the founder or account director in the room. Only then does code get written.
Recourse: if the first PR opens before the architecture brief is signed, the audit week is refunded in full and you can walk away with no exit cost.
Every fixed-scope sprint has a written “not in this build” list signed by you in week zero. If something we miss-estimated causes a slip, we extend the sprint at our cost to close the gap. No surprise overruns, no scope-creep change orders dropped on you in week five.
Recourse: if we miss our own estimate, the gap is on us. Up to and including the full final milestone payment if the build doesn’t ship.
If a date we committed to slips because of a call we made, our engineers work the gap on our clock. We’ll never ask you to choose between paying for the slip and shipping late. The only exception: scope changes you initiated, where we’d have brought you two costed options in writing before week three.
Recourse: the slip is invoiced at £0. Senior engineers stay on the project, daily standup continues, until the milestone is delivered.
Documentation is the work, not an afterthought. Every architectural decision lives in a doc inside your repo on the day it’s made. Every shipped commit has a README, a decision log entry, and an onboarding note. A new engineer joining your team should be productive in their first fortnight, not their third month.
Recourse: if a documentation gap blocks your team after handover, we’ll come back and write what’s missing at our cost, inside one working week.
Every engagement has a 30-day walk-away clause, working from your side and ours. No early-termination penalty. No clinging. A written handover at the end with documented codebase, credentials in your secrets manager, and an exit-interview note. We’ve invoked it twice in seven years; both ended kindly, and one of them came back for a different project 18 months later.
Recourse: 30-day written notice. No early-termination fee. Handover package on the last day.
All work product, architecture, documentation, and code assigns to your contract on commit, which assigns to you or your client. No background-IP clause hidden in the contract. No “our framework” lockout. Credentials never live in our systems; they live in your secrets manager from day one. UK GDPR DPA on file by default.
Recourse: IP assignment is contractual on every commit. Confidentiality survives the partnership for 5 years.
Most studios “guarantee” outcomes they can’t define. We define the bad outcome first, then write the recourse next to it. So the contract reads the same whether things go well or wrong.
You get: full refund of unpaid work + written explanation within 7 days.
You get: audit week refunded in full + no exit cost.
You get: we work the gap at £0/hr until the milestone delivers.
You get: we come back and write what’s missing inside one working week, at no cost.
You get: 30-day notice, no early-termination fee, full handover on the last day.
You get: same-day rotation + written incident report + UK GDPR DPA-aligned notification.
Times tested
Without a dispute
Most studio “guarantees” never get tested. Ours have, three times in seven years. Here’s what happened, written plainly.
The build was harder than our week-zero estimate. We extended the sprint at our cost, kept three engineers on the project for 14 extra working days, and the founder paid nothing for the gap. The MVP shipped. The founder didn’t renew. We changed our scoping process the following Monday.
What it cost us: roughly £9K in engineer time. What we learned: the “not in this build” list is now signed in week zero on every contract.
The in-house team inherited the codebase and couldn’t explain a decision to a new joiner. The decision log doc didn’t exist for that surface. We came back, wrote the brief retroactively, and held a 2-hour walk-through with the new joiner. Total time on our clock: 5 working days. Total invoice to the client: zero.
What it cost us: 5 days of senior time. What we changed: decision logs now ship the day the call is made, not at the end of the sprint.
The brief drifted into a category we don’t do well (live-event streaming hardware), and we’d been quietly losing money on it for 8 weeks. We invoked the 30-day walk-away on our side, wrote a referral to a studio who specialises in the work, and finished a clean handover. The agency renewed with us 6 months later on a different project.
What it cost us: roughly £14K and one quarter’s pipeline. What we learned: our intake form now asks for hardware dependencies in the first email.
You shouldn’t need a lawyer to read your dev studio’s MSA. Here’s the legal stack that runs underneath every engagement, written so a founder or AD can understand it in 90 seconds.
Before the partnership call. One page. Survives the engagement for 5 years.
What it covers your client list, your roadmap, and every line of code you share.
Assigns to your contract on every commit. No background-IP clause.
What you keep your framework, your code, your client’s asset.
Data Processing Agreement on file by default. Lawful basis named on every system.
On file Data Subject Access Request handling rehearsed quarterly.
Available as a costed roadmap on the engagement, where it’s on your due-diligence checklist.
Timeline Type I within 4 months, Type II within 12 months.
We don’t train models on your code, your data, or your customers’ data.
Before we connect the AI tool list is in writing and you approve it.
We don’t pitch your clients during the engagement or for 24 months after.
Inbound from your clients gets forwarded to your AD, unanswered.
Professional indemnity £2M, public liability £5M, cyber liability £1M.
Certificates on file, sent on request before the contract is signed.
In the contract. Each of the seven promises is a numbered clause in Annex A of every MSA we’ve signed since 2019. We’ll send you the MSA before the partnership call so you can read the exact wording with your lawyer if you want. There’s nothing on this page that doesn’t appear in the legal document.
The week-zero scope document is the boundary. Anything inside that scope is on our clock if we miss the estimate. Anything outside it is a scope change initiated by you, which gets costed in writing before we move on it. The boundary is the contract itself; we don’t make judgement calls on it mid-sprint.
UK GDPR 72-hour notification process kicks in the moment we’re aware. Cyber liability insurance covers up to £1M. Written incident report inside 72 hours, including the credentials rotated, the systems touched, and the timeline. We rehearse this quarterly with the team. We’ve never had to deliver one in production for a client, and the rehearsals exist so we never do.
Yes, with two amendments: we add the seven promises as a side annex, and we keep our 30-day walk-away clause. Both are non-negotiable. Everything else (payment terms, IP, indemnity, jurisdiction) is on the table for your legal team.
Tell us, by email to Mohit, on the day you notice it. The 30-day walk-away clause is the floor; the real answer is always a conversation first. Inside the seven years we’ve been running this, every relationship that ended ended kindly. We’d rather you walked away clean than stayed unhappily.
A look at the kind of our guarantee surface we hand over — real screens, real data, documented and yours from day one.