Terms of Service

The ground rules for working with us — short, in plain English, and honest about what we can and can’t promise.

The short version. We build and run your website. You pay monthly, month to month, and either of us can stop with 30 days’ notice. Your brand and your content stay yours; the platform underneath stays ours. We can’t promise a Google ranking, and anyone who does is guessing.

If you’ve signed a proposal or agreement with us, that document is the actual deal — these terms are the general backdrop, and where the two disagree, the signed one wins.

1. Who this is between

“We”, “us” and “Founders Studio” mean Pillar Supply LLC, trading as Founders Studio. “You” means whoever is reading this site or paying us to build something. Using founders-studio.com means you accept these terms. Hiring us means both of us do.

2. What we do

We design and build websites for local businesses, host and maintain them, and for some clients we handle the marketing side as well — search setup, business listings, content. What we’re doing for you specifically is whatever your proposal says. If it isn’t written down it isn’t in scope; ask us and we’ll quote it.

3. What a client gets

While your account is active and paid up:

• your website, designed and built for your business, on your own domain
• hosting, security updates and the ongoing maintenance that keeps it up
• a dashboard where you can change your own words and photos without calling anyone
• support from us, by email or phone
• anything else itemised in your proposal — search setup, listings, content, extra pages, marketing

4. Money

• Monthly, in advance, month to month. No annual lock-in and no long contract.
• Setup fees, where your proposal has one, are due before we start and are not refundable once work has begun.
• We bill through Stripe. Keeping a working payment method on file is your side of that.
• If a payment fails we’ll tell you and try again. If it stays unpaid for 15 days we may pause the site until it’s settled. We won’t delete anything without telling you first.
• Prices can change with 30 days’ notice. If the new price doesn’t work for you, cancel — see section 5.

5. Ending it

Either of us can end the arrangement with 30 days’ written notice — email counts. You pay for the notice period, and we don’t refund a month already under way. We can also suspend or end the service if an account goes unpaid or if section 7 gets broken, and we’ll tell you why when we do.

On the way out you get your content, and we’ll help point your domain wherever you want it. What we don’t do is hold your business hostage — see section 8.

6. Your side of it

When you hire us, you’re confirming that:

• the logos, photos, text, reviews and video you give us are yours to use
• what your website says about your business is true — prices, claims, licences, hours
• you’ll keep your dashboard login to yourself, and tell us promptly if it gets out
• you’ll follow the law that applies to your business, including the rules on marketing email and text messages — consent, unsubscribe, all of it

7. What you can’t use our work for

Don’t use anything we build, host or run to:

• break the law, or help anyone else break it
• publish content that is somebody else’s to publish
• send spam, or messages people never agreed to receive
• carry malware, phishing pages, or anything else built to harm a visitor
• attack, mass-scrape, overload or reverse-engineer the platform
• resell access to the platform as though it were yours

We can suspend a site doing any of the above, and we’ll say why.

8. Who owns what

Yours. Your business name, logo, brand, photos, video, words, customer list, and everything you or your customers put into the site. It is yours during the engagement and after it. Take it with you.

Ours. The design system, page templates, code, tooling and platform that run the site — including the parts of it we wrote while working on your project. While you’re a client and paid up, you have a licence to use all of it for your own business. That licence ends when the engagement does. Your content doesn’t go with it.

Portfolio. We like to show the work — a screenshot, a link, a short write-up. Tell us no and we won’t.

9. What we can’t promise

We’re good at this. We are not fortune tellers.

• No guarantee of results. No promised Google ranking, traffic number, lead count or sale. Anyone promising you those is guessing.
• Search engines, social platforms and listing sites change their rules whenever they feel like it, and we don’t control them.
• We aim to keep your site up all the time and we watch it, but no host is perfect. Outages at the companies named in our Privacy Policy are outside our hands.
• Third-party tools you use alongside your site come with their own terms. Those are between you and them.

Beyond what’s written here and in your proposal, the service is provided as it is.

10. If something goes wrong

If we get something wrong, what we owe you is capped at what you paid us in the three months before the problem. Neither of us owes the other for indirect losses — lost profit, lost data, lost business, the sale that didn’t happen. Some states don’t allow limits like that; if yours doesn’t, this applies as far as the law lets it.

11. If we disagree

Email bernardo@founders-studio.com first. Nearly everything gets sorted out in a phone call. If it can’t be, these terms are governed by the laws of the State of Ohio, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and any dispute belongs in the state or federal courts sitting in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

12. Housekeeping

• If one clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.
• Not enforcing something once doesn’t mean we’ve given it up.
• You can’t hand your agreement to someone else without asking us first. We can transfer ours if the business is sold.
• These terms plus your signed proposal are the whole agreement, and they replace anything said before.

13. Changes to these terms

Updates get posted here with a new date at the top. If a change actually affects clients, we email them at least 30 days ahead. Carrying on as a client after that means the new terms are fine by you.

14. Text messages

Founders Studio client messages is our text-messaging program, run by Pillar Supply LLC. If you agree to receive texts from us — by ticking the box on our contact form, or by texting us first — we use them for the work: replies to your inquiry, project updates, questions and approvals, appointment reminders and billing notices. No marketing blasts.

• Message frequency varies with how much is happening on your project.
• Message and data rates may apply.
• Reply STOP to any message to stop receiving them; we’ll send one message confirming you’re unsubscribed and nothing after it. Reply START to opt back in.
• Reply HELP for help, or reach us at bernardo@founders-studio.com or (216) 310-2050.
• Agreeing to texts is never a condition of buying anything from us.
• Mobile carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.

How we handle your number is in our Privacy Policy. The short version: it is never shared with anyone for their marketing.

15. Contact