Terms of engagement.
Short, plain, and the same for everyone. They’re here so the price, the scope and the support hours are all settled in writing before any work starts, rather than argued about afterwards.
Who you are dealing with
Zander Custom Services · ABN 38 532 979 240 · Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Trading under a registered business name. Where these terms say “we”, that’s who is meant. The work is not handed to anybody else.
Scope and fixed pricing
Every line on the services page carries a published price. That price is what the work costs. Where a price is shown as a range, it’s because the scope genuinely varies, and you’re given a single number in writing before anything starts.
Prices are in Australian dollars. No GST is charged.
There’s no hourly meter. If a job takes longer than we estimated and the scope hasn’t changed, that’s our problem, not an invoice.
What a written scope covers
Before work begins you get a written scope. It says what will be done and what won’t be, what we need from you and by when, the date or maintenance window the work runs in, and what you’re handed at the end. Anything that isn’t in it is not in the price.
Sometimes the work turns out to be materially different from what we agreed: an environment that is not what it was described as, or a dependency nobody knew about. It is re-priced in writing and you decide whether to go on. It is never billed as a surprise afterwards.
Payment terms
Project work is invoiced half on acceptance of the written scope and the balance on handover. Ongoing work is invoiced monthly in advance. Invoices are payable within fourteen days of issue.
Accounts you own stay in your name: hosting, domains, DNS, licences. Whoever provides them bills you directly. We hold delegated admin and charge to manage them. We do not resell them and we do not mark them up.
Support hours, honestly stated
This isn’t a 24/7 service and it is not sold as one. Email is answered within one business day. Cutovers and maintenance run evenings and weekends AEST by design, because that’s usually when your change window is.
There’s no after-hours on-call arrangement, no emergency response retainer and no incident hotline. If you need those, you need a firm that staffs them. We’ll say so and point you at one, rather than sell you a response time we could not honour.
Consumer guarantees, cancellation and refunds
The consumer guarantees in the Australian Consumer Law apply to the services sold here and cannot be excluded, restricted or modified — not by these terms and not by anything else on this site. Work must be supplied with due care and skill, be fit for the purpose we agreed, and be delivered within a reasonable time. Where it is not, you are entitled to a remedy: the problem fixed, the work performed again, or a refund, depending on how serious the failure is. That is your right, not a concession granted here.
Beyond the guarantees: cancel a project before we’ve started and anything you’ve paid is returned in full. Cancel part-way through and you pay for the work actually done to that point, and the remainder of anything paid in advance is returned. Ongoing work is month to month, and either of us can end it with thirty days’ notice. The final month is not charged beyond the notice period.
If something has gone wrong, say so first. Most of it gets fixed in a day. Nothing in this paragraph asks you to give up any right you would otherwise have.