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Terms of business

A plain summary of our standard positions. The contract itself governs; this is here so nothing in it is a surprise.

This is demo content

SoftOpen is a fictional company created for product demonstrations. These terms are written to be plausible, not to be relied upon. Do not use them as a template.

Last updated: 4 August 2026

Engagement

Work is performed under a signed statement of work referencing our master services agreement. Professional services are charged time and materials against an agreed estimate, or fixed price with change control where the scope is tight enough to justify it. We do not fix-price work before discovery, because the number would be a guess with a decimal point on it.

Software licences

We do not sell, sublicense or grant rights in any software. The platforms we deploy — ERPNext, Grafana, Mattermost, Twenty and Umbraco — are independent open-source projects licensed under their own terms, which you obtain directly and at no cost. Compliance with those licences is your responsibility, and we will advise on it. No invoice from SoftOpen includes a licence fee.

Intellectual property

You own the configuration we produce for you and any extension we write for you, outright, from the first commit. It lives in your repository. We retain rights only in our own pre-existing tooling and methods, which are not needed to run or maintain your platform.

Source code escrow is not applicable. You already have the source.

What we do not do

  • Fork upstream code. Customisation is delivered through the platform’s supported extension points. Forked or hand-patched code cannot be supported under an SLA.
  • Commit to upstream roadmaps. We do not control these projects and cannot promise a feature or a date, including one that has been publicly discussed.
  • Support past end-of-life. Upgrading before upstream support ends is a condition of continued support, not an upsell.
  • Host outside the UK and EU. Not offered, including on request.

Support

Support is contracted annually per platform at the tier stated in the order. We commit to responding within the target for the agreed severity, with a named engineer engaged. We do not commit to a resolution time, because the cause may sit upstream in code we do not control. Severity is agreed with you at the point the incident is logged.

Hosting

Managed hosting is contracted for a minimum of twelve months per environment. Third-party infrastructure costs are passed through at cost with no margin when hosted in our account, and itemised separately. Either party may terminate at the end of a term on 60 days’ notice.

Payment

30 days from invoice. Support and hosting are invoiced annually in advance; quarterly is available above £40,000 with approval. Statutory interest applies to late payment, though in practice we would rather ring you.

Liability

Our aggregate liability is capped at 100% of the fees paid in the preceding twelve months. Neither party excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. Indirect and consequential loss is excluded.

Exit

There is no exit fee. On termination you keep a running system, your data and the runbooks. If the platform sits in your own cloud account, nothing moves — we hand over and remove our access. If it is on our platform, migration to yours is a scoped piece of work at our standard rates.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

Questions

Email hello@softopen.co.uk and we will put you in touch with whoever can answer properly.