Payment terms and refunds

We invoice in US dollars, pounds sterling, euros, or Indian rupees. The currency is fixed in the proposal and does not change during a project, so exchange rate movement is our risk and not yours.

We accept:

• Bank transfer through Wise, Payoneer, or Skydo — our preferred methods, and the cheapest for you. Each gives us local receiving details in USD, GBP, and EUR, so paying us is a domestic transfer at your end rather than an international wire.
• Card and ACH through Stripe — convenient, and subject to a 3% processing fee added at invoice.
• PayPal — available on request, subject to a 4% processing fee.
• SWIFT transfer to our Indian bank — used where the above are unavailable. You pay your bank's charges, we pay ours.

Tell us which of these suits your finance team and we will invoice through it. Switching between them mid-project is fine.

We do not accept cryptocurrency, and we will never email you asking to change our bank details. If you receive such a message, it is not from us. Call us on the number you already have before acting on it.

Fixed-price projects are billed in milestones so that neither side is ever badly exposed. The standard schedule is:

• 30% on acceptance of the proposal, before work begins.
• 40% at the agreed midpoint milestone, when you have a working staging environment to review.
• 30% on completion, before the project is deployed to your production environment.

Projects longer than three months are usually split into more, smaller milestones instead. Projects under $2,000 are invoiced 50% up front and 50% on completion.

Retainers are invoiced on the first working day of the month they cover, and are payable before that month's work starts. Dedicated developer arrangements follow the same pattern.

Invoices are payable within 14 days of issue unless the proposal says otherwise.

A milestone is reached when the work described for it is complete and available for you to review, not when a date passes. We invoice against delivery.

You have five working days to review a milestone. If you raise a defect within that window, we correct it before the milestone is treated as accepted. If we hear nothing in five working days, the milestone is accepted and the invoice stands.

Review is for checking the work against the agreed scope. New requirements are welcome, but they are change requests rather than defects, and they are quoted separately.

If an invoice passes its due date we will send a reminder. Past 14 days overdue we may pause work on your project, and we will tell you before we do.

Overdue amounts carry interest at 1.5% per month, or the maximum permitted by law where that is lower, accruing daily from the due date until payment is received.

Where recovery costs are incurred, including legal or collection fees, those are payable by you. Work resumes, and any live deployment proceeds, once the account is settled.

If cash flow is the problem, tell us before the due date. We have rescheduled payment plans for clients who asked, and we would far rather do that than stop a project.

All prices are exclusive of tax. Indian GST is not charged on services exported outside India, and our invoices are issued accordingly.

Any sales tax, VAT, use tax, or reverse-charge obligation arising in your own country is yours to account for. UK and EU business clients normally account for VAT under the reverse charge, and we will show your VAT number on the invoice where you provide it.

Where your jurisdiction requires you to deduct withholding tax from a payment to us, the invoiced amount is grossed up so that the sum we receive equals the sum invoiced. Please send the withholding certificate, as we can often reclaim it under a double taxation treaty.

Bank charges, intermediary fees, and currency conversion costs at your end are yours. Our published prices are the amount we must receive.

You may cancel a project at any time with 15 days' written notice. Retainers require 30 days' written notice, and the notice period is payable.

On cancellation you pay for all completed work and all work in progress up to the cancellation date, less anything already paid. Where that calculation leaves a balance in your favour, we refund it within 14 days.

The initial deposit covers scheduling, discovery, and the resources we set aside for you, and is not refundable once work has begun.

Everything produced up to the cancellation date is handed over, in a usable and documented form, once the final balance is settled. We do not hold work hostage beyond the sums genuinely owed.

This is custom work delivered in stages, not a product you can return, so a blanket money-back guarantee would be dishonest. What we offer instead is specific:

• If we fail to deliver a milestone and cannot put it right within 30 days of you telling us in writing, we refund the amount paid for that milestone in full.
• If we cancel a project for our own reasons, we refund everything paid for work not yet delivered, and hand over what exists at no charge.
• If you paid for a retainer month and we did not make the hours available, we refund the unused portion or roll it forward, whichever you prefer.

We do not refund completed and accepted work, work cancelled because your own priorities changed, delays caused by waiting on your content or approvals, or dissatisfaction with a result that matches the agreed scope.

Approved refunds are issued to the original payment method within 14 days.

If something is wrong with an invoice, tell us within seven days of receiving it and we will look at it before it becomes a problem. Most disputes turn out to be a scope misunderstanding that is fixed in one conversation.

Please raise a dispute with us before raising a chargeback with your bank or card issuer. A chargeback filed without contacting us first is treated as non-payment: it suspends work immediately, and we will contest it with the signed scope, the delivery record, and the correspondence.

Any bank or processor fee arising from a chargeback we successfully contest is added to your account.

Intellectual property in the deliverables passes to you when all invoices for the engagement are paid in full. Until then the work is licensed to you for review only.

Because your repositories, hosting, and domains are in your own accounts from day one, this is a contractual position rather than a lever. We are not able to lock you out of your own infrastructure, and we have deliberately set it up that way.

Questions about an invoice or these terms go to contact@maeratech.com, and we answer them the same working day.