Terms of use

1. What this chapter is, and what governs where

ZAAPTO publishes a short handbook about its own boundaries. The privacy notice follows personal data across each of them. Chapter three takes the narrowest boundary of the set, the one at your browser. This chapter states what is agreed at each boundary, in the same order the others use.

One point outranks everything else on this page. These terms govern your use of a website. They are not the terms on which ZAAPTO does paid work. Paid work runs on a signed engagement contract, and wherever that contract and this page differ, the contract decides and this page has no bearing on the question.

Reading a page here means the terms below apply to that reading. Someone who would rather they did not apply has a simple remedy, which is to close the page; nothing on this site needs to be read in order to contact the company.

2. Who you are dealing with

ZAAPTO LTD, a private company limited by shares, formed in England and Wales, carrying company number 16938315. Everything in writing, formal notice included, reaches the company at [email protected]. Anything that has to travel on paper goes to the registered office held against that number at Companies House.

Through the rest of this chapter, we and us mean that company. You means whoever is reading these pages or writing to the address printed on them.

3. The reading boundary: using zaapto.uk

This is the lightest crossing in the handbook. No account is opened, nothing is submitted, and the site asks you for no information in order to show you a page.

You may read every page here, print any of them, and quote or forward the contents the way anyone quotes a public document, so long as the quotation stays accurate and says which company it came from. That permission belongs to you personally. It does not become a right of anyone you pass the material to, and it can be withdrawn where it is plainly being abused.

What the permission does not stretch to is reproducing the site: lifting its text in bulk onto another domain, or dressing a different business in these pages. Section 4 says who owns what, and section 5 lists the handful of things not to do to the server.

4. What is published here, and who owns it

The wording, the structure of the pages, the stylesheet, the mark and the arrangement of the whole are owned by ZAAPTO LTD or used with the owner's permission. The two typefaces are licensed from their foundries by way of Google Fonts; they are not ours to pass on, and anyone wanting to use them should license them in their own right.

ZAAPTO is the company's trading name and is used as a mark. This chapter grants nobody a right to trade under it or to suggest an association with it. The company for its part claims no relationship with any other business whose name happens to resemble this one.

Where any page here quotes or refers to a statute, a regulator or a third party's product, that reference identifies the thing referred to and implies no endorsement running in either direction.

5. Acceptable use of the site

A static site offers very little to misuse, so the list is short. While using this site you should not:

• try to reach any part of the hosting, the origin server or an administrative surface that has not been handed to you;
• probe, scan or stress the site, or point automated traffic at it in volumes that degrade it for other readers;
• attempt to introduce anything malicious into what is served from this domain, or to change what other readers receive from it;
• harvest the site wholesale in order to reconstitute it somewhere else.

Behaviour in the first three of those categories can amount to a criminal offence under the 1990 Act dealing with computer misuse. Where it does, reporting it to the authorities is the ordinary response and should be expected rather than treated as an escalation.

6. Availability

These are static documents, which makes them cheap to serve and dependable in practice, but dependable is not the same as guaranteed. The site can be unreachable while it is being edited, while the hosting provider is working on something of its own, or for reasons that sit outside the control of either of us.

No availability figure is offered for these pages, and none should be read into the fact that they are usually there. Pages may be revised, moved or taken down without warning. Each handbook chapter carries an effective date at its head so that a reader can always tell which version they are holding.

7. The enquiry boundary: an email to ZAAPTO

Writing to the published address opens a conversation. It does not open a contract, and of all the boundaries in the handbook this is the one where the difference is most often assumed away.

• An email, a call, a meeting, or a rough figure mentioned during any of them, binds neither side. Work starts when an engagement is signed, and not at any earlier point.
• Everything published on this site is an invitation to make contact. None of it is an offer that could be accepted into a contract by replying to it.
• How the studio works — the stages, who ends up owning a specification, what handover consists of — is described on this site as standing practice. What binds in a particular piece of work is what that engagement's contract says.
• What you send is treated as confidential and used to answer you. Please do not send credentials, live personal data or a system export while still at the enquiry stage: nothing at that stage requires them, and section 9 describes the arrangement under which material of that kind is ever handled.

What becomes of your message once it arrives is a privacy question rather than a contractual one, and it is answered at the correspondence boundary in chapter one.

8. The engagement boundary: signed work

Past this boundary, this page stops being the governing document. Scope, price, timetable, ownership, support and the data protection terms all live in the contract both sides sign. Nothing on this page adds to that contract and nothing on it takes anything away.

Two features of the arrangement are stated publicly because they shape what a reader is deciding about before any contract exists:

• The written specification that a paid discovery produces belongs to the client once it is delivered. It can be carried to a different developer without asking us and without anything further to pay.
• What gets built is built in accounts the client owns. No ZAAPTO runtime is inserted between a client and their own automation, and no delivered component is licensed back to the client on a continuing basis.

Neither of those is varied by anything in this chapter. Should a particular engagement contract provide otherwise, that contract governs, and the client should read it as the authority rather than reading this page.

9. The systems boundary: access into your estate

Where an engagement puts ZAAPTO inside a client's own systems, the terms of that access belong to the engagement contract and to the data processing terms attached to it. The handbook records the shape of the arrangement so that a prospective client can weigh it early:

• Access is requested one system at a time, named, and held to what the described work actually needs.
• Credentials are issued by the client and kept in the client's own secret store. The client withdraws them whenever the client chooses, and needs nothing from us in order to do it.
• Where a system offers a service account whose permissions can be narrowed, that is used in preference to any individual's own login.
• Personal data sitting in those systems remains the client's. We act on the client's documented instructions, on the footing set out at the engagement boundary in chapter one.

A client may audit this. Asking which accounts are held, and having them cut off, is a normal request during an engagement and does not require a reason to be given.

10. The supplier boundary: software you buy yourself

Third-party software involved in an engagement is bought by the client, in the client's name, against the client's payment method. No commission, margin or referral fee reaches us from anything we suggest a client buys, and a client who wants that confirmed in the contract can have it.

The consequence runs the other way too. That supplier's own terms bind the client directly, and we are not a party to them. If a vendor reshapes an interface, moves a price, tightens an allowance or retires a product outright, what that does to work already built is a matter for the vendor's terms and for whatever aftercare the engagement contract provides. We give no warranty over a third party's service and cannot undertake that it will go on behaving the way it behaves today.

Links leading from this site elsewhere are put there for convenience. We do not run those pages, do not check them continuously, and do not adopt what they say by linking to them.

11. Liability, boundary by boundary

Some liabilities cannot lawfully be cut down by anybody, and they are not cut down here. Injury to a person, or a death, brought about by negligence on our side stands unlimited. So does our own fraud, or a fraudulent misstatement by us. So does anything else that legislation forbids a business to cap. Nothing further down this section touches any of them.

Subject to that, and confined to the website boundary:

• These pages are published as information about a company. They are not advice, whether legal, tax, accounting, financial or technical, and no reader should substitute them for advice taken on their own circumstances.
• Pages are written in good faith and kept current as a matter of practice. We do not warrant that every statement is complete or free of error, nor that the site will run uninterrupted or arrive free of anything harmful. Sensible precautions at your own end remain worth taking.
• We do not carry what you lose by acting on the site: profits you expected to earn, business you expected to win, goodwill, or data of which no copy was kept. That holds however the loss came about and whatever the claim is called.

Liability for paid work is a different matter entirely and is settled in the engagement contract, where it is negotiated, capped and insured on terms both sides have read before signing. This section does not describe it, and a reader should not treat the paragraphs above as a preview of what a contract will say.

12. If you are reading as a consumer

These pages address businesses, and ZAAPTO's engagements are business to business. A reader may nonetheless arrive here as a private individual, and if that is you, your statutory rights survive everything written above.

Nothing in this chapter removes or reduces a right given to you by the Consumer Rights Act 2015 or by any other consumer legislation. Where a term on this page would conflict with such a right, the right prevails and the term simply does not apply to you. Nor does anything here require a consumer to give up a remedy that legislation reserves to them.

13. Governing law and courts

The law of England and Wales applies to this chapter and to any dispute touching it, including a dispute that is not strictly contractual. The courts of England and Wales are the forum for such a dispute.

A consumer living in another part of the United Kingdom keeps whatever right they have to bring proceedings where they live, and this section does not attempt to take it away.

Nobody outside the two of us acquires an enforceable right from this chapter, and the 1999 Act on the rights of third parties does not change that position.

14. Notices

Formal notice to ZAAPTO can be sent to [email protected], or on paper to the registered office recorded against the company number at Companies House. Notice sent by email counts as delivered on the working day following the day it was sent, unless a delivery failure comes back to the sender.

Where a signed engagement contract sets out its own route for notices, that route governs anything to do with the work, and this section governs the website alone.

15. Revisions to this chapter

This page is subject to change. Whatever version stands here, carrying the effective date printed at its head, is the version that applies to your use of the site from the moment it is published. Glancing at the date now and then is the practical way to keep track, which is why the date is at the top rather than buried at the bottom.

An edit here has no effect on a signed engagement contract. Contracts move by agreement between the parties to them, never by a change to a web page, and a client who is told otherwise is being told something wrong.

The remaining chapters are the privacy notice and storage on your device. A request to delete data held about you is dealt with at the deletion section of chapter one.