Engagement Terms · Plain Language

How we work together

No fine print you'll meet later. This is how every BLKDMD engagement runs — billing, approvals, ownership, and how it ends if it ends. The signed agreement says the same things with more commas.

Two ways we charge. Only two.

BUILD — HOURLY, CAPPED

New systems are built by the hour against a written estimate.

Every project gets an estimate range and a hard cap we can't cross without your written OK. We flag at 75% so you're never surprised. Invoices go out bi-weekly with the time log attached — you see where every hour went.

RIDE — FLAT MONTHLY

Running systems are watched and maintained for a flat fee.

Monitoring, fixes, a set number of change-hours, and a monthly report of what ran and what we improved. No meters running, no surprise invoices. Cancel on 30 days' notice, and we hand everything over cleanly.

Payment terms

Item	Term
Deposit	50% of the low estimate books a build. Credited to your final invoice.
Invoices	Net 15. Builds bill bi-weekly; Ride bills on the 1st, in advance.
Methods	Interac e-Transfer or pre-authorized debit. Card via Stripe if you prefer.
Currency & tax	CAD, plus GST.
Late accounts	Reminders first, always. Past 20 days overdue, work and scheduled publishing pause until the account is current — then everything resumes where it left off.
Third-party costs	Ad spend, hosting and API fees run in your accounts, on your cards. We never mark up or float your media money.

Approvals mean something

Most of our systems publish content or take actions on your behalf. You review from a weekly link — approving an item authorizes us to publish it as scheduled. Every decision is logged with a timestamp, and anything you flag comes back revised the following week. One named approver on your side keeps it fast; their word is the word.

New systems run with training wheels for the first weeks: your approvals queue for a final human check before anything posts automatically.

What you own, what we keep

You own the deliverables. Once paid for, the systems, content and configurations we build for you are yours.
We keep our tools. The internal platforms we build with stay ours — your deliverables include a permanent license to whatever's embedded in them.
Your data is yours. Least-privilege access while we work, a documented handover and full revocation when we stop. We'll tell you exactly what access we hold, any time you ask.
AI, disclosed. Our systems use commercial AI services (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) to do their work. Your confidential data is never used to train anyone's models.
Portfolio, with permission. We don't name clients or show identifiable work without a written yes.

If it ends

Either of us can end things with 30 days' notice. You pay for work done; we hand over your deliverables, export your data, document what we ran, and revoke our own access. If you want us to help a new operator take over, that's normal hourly work and we'll do it properly. No hostages, ever — systems that only we can run would be bad engineering anyway.

The short version

Estimates in writing. Invoices with receipts. Your approvals logged. Your data portable. Our access revocable. If any of that isn't true at any point, tell us — that's a defect, and defects get fixed free.