Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of these terms

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are a binding agreement between you and Atlas Methods (“Atlas Methods,” “we,” “us,” “our”), operating from Southern California. By accessing atlasmethods.com (the “Site”), submitting the consultation form, or using the Atlas assistant, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Site.

2. What these terms cover

These Terms govern use of the Site. They are not the contract for the work.

Website builds, monthly care, and automation projects are governed by the written proposal, statement of work, or care-plan agreement signed by you and Atlas Methods (the “Service Agreement”). Sections 5 through 8 summarize how we work so there are no surprises; if anything in these Terms conflicts with a signed Service Agreement, the Service Agreement controls.

3. Who may use the Site

The Site is intended for business owners and operators. By using it you represent that you are at least 18 years old and, if you are submitting an inquiry for an organization, that you are authorized to do so on that organization’s behalf.

4. Consultations, quotes, and estimates

• Submitting the consultation form starts a conversation. It does not create a contract, reserve capacity, or obligate either party.
• The initial consultation submitted through our contact form is free and carries no obligation. Free consultations cover website builds, care plans, and general questions about fit. Automation engagements begin instead with a paid AI Automation Audit, a separate priced product described on our Services and Audit pages; its price and terms are confirmed before you pay.
• AI Automation Audit. The audit is priced from $300 (scope-dependent) and covers one primary workflow, agreed before the session; additional workflows are quoted separately. The fee is due before the session, and the session is scheduled once payment clears. You may reschedule once at no charge with at least 24 hours’ notice; later changes or a missed session may be treated as delivered. The audit is delivered when the working session has taken place and the written plan has been sent, normally within 3 business days of the session, and the fee is not refundable once delivered. The written plan is yours to keep and to use as you see fit, including with another provider. The $300 audit fee is credited in full toward the setup fee of an implementation project approved within 90 days. It does not apply to monthly retainers, unrelated website work, or third-party costs.
• Prices, tiers, timelines, and inclusions shown on the Site are illustrative and subject to change. They are not offers and do not guarantee availability, price, scope, or turnaround.
• Any figure we give before we have seen your content, access, and requirements is a preliminary range. A firm price follows scoping.
• Written proposals are valid for 30 days from the date issued.
• We may decline any request.

5. Engagement terms in brief

Summarized for transparency; the Service Agreement is the controlling document.

• Sequence. Free consultation for website and care work, or a paid AI Automation Audit for automation work, then scope, deposit, build, review, launch.
• Deposit and balance. 50% of the setup fee is due to schedule the build; the balance is due at launch. Monthly care is billed in advance on a recurring basis as described in Section 7.
• Timelines. Published turnarounds, including the 5–10 business day sprint, run from the point where scope is locked and we have your content, assets, and access. Delays in those inputs move the schedule. Schedules are good-faith estimates and we are not liable for delays outside our reasonable control.
• Your dependencies. You are responsible for supplying business facts, photos, logos, domain control, and any third-party accounts needed. If we draft copy, you supply the underlying facts and you review and approve them before launch.
• Revisions and scope changes. Each tier includes the revision rounds stated in the proposal. Changes to page count, structure, integrations, or scope after approval are handled by written change order and may affect price and schedule.
• Launch approval. You review and approve the site before it goes live. Errors present in approved content are not covered by warranty, and corrections are billable at the then-current rate.
• Third-party costs. Domain registration, hosting, email, and any paid third-party service used by your site or workflow are billed to you by that provider or passed through at cost, as stated in the proposal.
• Cancellation before launch. You may cancel a build in writing at any time before launch. The 50% deposit reserves your schedule and covers work performed, and it is not refundable once we have started. If you cancel before any work begins, the deposit is refunded in full. If you cancel mid-build, you owe the deposit plus any work completed beyond it at the rate in your proposal, and we deliver what has been produced to that point once the balance is settled. Third-party costs already incurred on your behalf, such as a domain registration, are not refundable.
• If we cancel. If we withdraw from a build for a reason other than your non-performance or non-payment, we refund any amount paid for work not yet performed.
• Warranty. Any workmanship warranty is stated in the Service Agreement.

6. Ownership of what we build

You own your website outright. On final payment of the setup fee, we assign to you all right, title, and interest in the final page code, content, and configuration produced for you, and we hand over the repository, domain control, and any accounts we created on your behalf. There is no proprietary platform, no license fee to keep the site running, and no editor subscription required to keep using it.

We retain ownership of our own pre-existing and general-purpose materials: internal tooling, component patterns, prompt libraries, boilerplate, and know-how developed before or independently of your project. Your deliverable includes a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license to use those materials as embedded in it. Nothing in this Section transfers ownership of third-party open-source components, which remain governed by their own licenses.

Leaving is not a penalty event: if you end a care plan or move to another provider, you keep the site, the code, and the accounts.

Until the setup fee is paid in full, we retain ownership of the deliverable and you have no license to publish it or use it in production. On payment in full, the assignment above takes effect automatically, with no further paperwork required.

You can ask for everything at any time, not only when a plan ends. On your written request, we will give you a complete, portable export of all content we produced for you, including the final page code, content, configuration, and repository, in standard, editable formats with no proprietary lock-in. We deliver it at no additional charge, usually within 5 business days.

7. Monthly care plans, renewal, and cancellation

Monthly care plans are a continuous service that renews automatically every month until you cancel. Before you enroll, and again in your signed Service Agreement, we state clearly and conspicuously:

• the plan you are enrolling in and what it includes;
• the recurring price and the billing frequency (monthly, in advance);
• that the plan renews automatically until cancelled;
• the length of any promotional, free, or rate-locked period and the price that applies when it ends; and
• how to cancel.

We obtain your express affirmative consent to those automatic renewal terms separately from the rest of the agreement, and we send you an acknowledgment you can keep that repeats the terms and the cancellation method.

7.1 Promotional and rate-locked periods

Where an offer includes a free first month or a rate lock, the offer terms, the date the promotional period ends, and the standard rate that follows are stated before you enroll. A rate lock holds your monthly care price for the stated number of billing months from enrollment; at the end of that term the then-current standard rate applies. For any free, gift, trial, or discounted period longer than 31 days, we send a reminder to the email address on file no less than 3 and no more than 21 days before the standard rate takes effect, stating the new price, the date it starts, and how to cancel.

7.2 How to cancel

You can cancel at any time, effective at the end of the current billing month, by emailing info@atlasmethods.com with “Cancel care plan” in the subject line. Cancellation is confirmed in writing within one business day; you never have to call, sit through a retention offer, or complete any step beyond that message. If you sign up through any online mechanism, you will always be able to cancel through an online mechanism that is at least as easy.

7.3 Effect of cancellation

Fees already billed for the current month are not prorated or refunded unless the Service Agreement says otherwise. On cancellation, maintenance, monitoring, and support stop at the end of the paid period; your site stays yours and stays online, subject to your hosting and domain arrangements. Any rate lock ends with the plan, and re-enrolling later is at the then-current standard rate.

7.4 Changes to plan pricing

We may change care-plan pricing on at least 30 days’ written notice to the email address on file. A change never applies inside an active rate-locked term. If you do not accept a price change, cancel before it takes effect.

7.5 Nonpayment and suspension

If a payment fails, we will notify you and may suspend care-plan services after 10 days. Suspension of maintenance does not take your website offline.

7.6 Payment processing and itemized charges

Monthly care-plan fees and any additional charges are billed through Stripe, our payment processor. You will receive a personalized, secure Stripe payment link for your recurring plan; Stripe collects and stores your payment details directly, and we never see or store your card number.

Beyond the recurring monthly fee, we may add itemized charges to your account for work or costs outside your plan; for example, a domain renewal, a hosting overage, or an out-of-scope change you requested. Each itemized charge appears as a separate line on your invoice alongside the recurring fee, so you can see exactly what you were billed and why. Itemized charges are billed at the price we quote you in writing before doing the work, and typically appear on your next regular invoice unless we agree to bill them separately.

Invoices are due on receipt unless your Service Agreement states otherwise. The amount, due date, and any late fee for your specific plan are set out in your Service Agreement; this Section describes how those charges are processed, not what they are. Section 7.5 above governs what happens if a payment fails.

8. AI automation services

AI automation is sold as a discrete product and only recommended once a website is live and a specific workflow is worth automating. Additional terms apply because these systems behave probabilistically.

• Output is not guaranteed. AI systems produce statistical output. They can be wrong, incomplete, or inconsistent, and their behavior can change when an underlying model changes. We do not warrant that any automation will be error-free, will reach a particular accuracy rate, or will produce a specific business result, unless a target is written into the Service Agreement.
• Human review is your responsibility. You decide what an automation is allowed to do without a person in the loop. We will recommend review points; you own the decision and the outcome of anything it sends, files, routes, or answers on your behalf.
• Not professional advice. Automations we build do not provide legal, medical, financial, or other regulated professional advice, and must not be deployed to do so.
• Third-party model providers. Automations depend on third-party AI providers whose pricing, availability, terms, rate limits, and model versions can change or be discontinued. Those changes are outside our control, and a provider change is not a defect. Where an automation sends your data or your customers’ data to a model provider, we identify the provider before launch, and their terms apply to that processing. We do not permit a provider to use your data to train its models where the provider offers that control, and we tell you when a provider does not.
• No regulated advice. Automations we build do not provide legal, medical, financial, tax, or other regulated professional advice, and must not be deployed to do so. They are not medical devices and are not for use in diagnosis or treatment. If your workflow touches protected health information, we do not begin work until a business associate agreement is signed.
• Your compliance obligations. If an automation interacts with your customers, you are responsible for the disclosures your industry and jurisdiction require, including telling people when they are talking to a bot. We will build the disclosure in when you ask us to.
• Data handled on your behalf. Personal information processed by an automation we run for you is handled as described in Section 8 of the Privacy Policy: you are the responsible party and we act as your service provider.
• Ongoing costs. Model usage fees, API costs, and platform subscriptions are yours unless the proposal says otherwise.

9. The Atlas assistant on this site

The chat widget on this Site is an AI assistant, not a person. It is provided for general information about our services. It runs on an open-weight model hosted by Ollama, Inc. (Ollama Cloud); the model may change, and messages you send it are processed as described in Section 3.3 of our Privacy Policy.

• Nothing it says is an offer, a quote, a commitment, or professional advice, and nothing it says binds Atlas Methods. Pricing and scope are only firm in a written proposal.
• Its answers may be inaccurate or out of date. Where the assistant conflicts with this Site or with a written proposal, the written document controls.
• Do not enter passwords, credentials, financial or health information, or confidential third-party data into the chat.
• We may rate limit, suspend, or withdraw the assistant at any time. It is currently limited to 20 messages per hour per visitor.

10. Your content and access credentials

You retain ownership of the logos, artwork, text, photographs, and files you send us. By sending them you represent and warrant that you own them or hold the rights necessary to have them published, and you grant Atlas Methods a non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, adapt, and display them as needed to scope, build, launch, and maintain your project.

Unless you tell us otherwise in writing, you also grant us permission to reference the completed work and show screenshots of it in our portfolio, on this Site, and in proposals. Tell us at any time and we will stop using them going forward.

Where a client gives us a testimonial, review, or written feedback in connection with discounted pricing, we disclose that connection wherever we publish it, so a reader knows the endorsement came from someone who received a discount. Any testimonial describes one client’s experience and is not a promise of similar results.

You are responsible for the accuracy and legality of what you supply, including trademark rights, licensing for stock imagery, testimonial substantiation, and any claims or disclosures your industry requires. Where you give us access to hosting, domain, email, or third-party accounts, you confirm you are authorized to do so; we use that access only to perform the work and you may revoke it at any time.

11. Our intellectual property

This Site, its text, layout, illustrations, and code, and the Atlas Methods name and marks, are owned by Atlas Methods or its licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark, and other laws. You may view and print pages for your own evaluation of our services. You may not copy, republish, sell, or use them commercially without our written permission. Section 6 governs ownership of work we produce for a client.

If you believe material on this Site infringes your copyright or trademark, email info@atlasmethods.com with the work at issue, the URL where it appears, and your contact information. We will investigate and remove infringing material promptly.

12. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Submit false, misleading, or another person’s information through any form on the Site.
• Use the consultation form or the assistant to send solicitations, advertising, or bulk messages.
• Scrape, harvest, or systematically download Site content, except by search-engine crawlers that respect our robots.txt.
• Use the Site or the assistant to develop, train, benchmark, or evaluate a competing model or product.
• Attempt to extract the assistant’s instructions, manipulate it into off-topic or harmful output, or defeat bot protection or rate limits.
• Probe, scan, or breach the Site’s security, or interfere with its operation.
• Upload or transmit malware, or use the Site in violation of any law.

We may block access, remove submissions, or take other action for any violation.

13. Site availability and changes

We may change, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Site at any time without notice, and we may update these Terms as described in Section 20. We do not guarantee that the Site will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of harmful components. Uptime commitments for a site or workflow we maintain for you, if any, live in the Service Agreement.

14. Third-party services and links

The Site relies on third-party services for hosting and security (Cloudflare), bot verification (Cloudflare Turnstile), web fonts (Google Fonts), email delivery (Resend), payment processing (Stripe), and AI inference for the assistant (Ollama Cloud), and it links to third-party websites. We do not control those services and are not responsible for their content, availability, or practices. Your use of them is governed by their own terms.

15. Disclaimer of warranties

THE SITE, THE ATLAS ASSISTANT, AND ALL CONTENT ON THEM ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, ATLAS METHODS DISCLAIMS ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTY THAT THE SITE OR ITS AI-GENERATED OUTPUT WILL BE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, SECURE, OR UNINTERRUPTED.

This Section applies to the Site only. Warranties for work you engage us to perform, if any, are stated in your Service Agreement and are not disclaimed here.

Content on the Site, including pages describing our services, prices, and timelines, is general information. It is not legal, tax, accounting, or other professional advice, and you should not rely on it as a substitute for advice about your own situation.

16. Limitation of liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, ATLAS METHODS AND ITS OWNERS, EMPLOYEES, AND CONTRACTORS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST BUSINESS, LOST LEADS, OR LOSS OF DATA, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO YOUR USE OF THE SITE OR THE ATLAS ASSISTANT, WHETHER BASED IN CONTRACT, TORT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR ANY OTHER THEORY, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

OUR TOTAL LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SITE WILL NOT EXCEED ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100). LIABILITY ARISING FROM AN ENGAGEMENT IS GOVERNED BY THE SERVICE AGREEMENT.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages, so parts of Sections 15 and 16 may not apply to you. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud, personal injury caused by negligence, or gross misconduct.

17. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Atlas Methods and its owners, employees, and contractors from any claims, damages, liabilities, and reasonable attorneys’ fees arising out of your misuse of the Site, your violation of these Terms or of any law, or any claim that content, artwork, or data you supplied infringes a third party’s intellectual property or other rights.

18. Dispute resolution

Before filing any claim, you agree to contact us in writing at info@atlasmethods.com with a description of the dispute and the relief you seek, and to allow 30 days for us to resolve it informally. Most issues are resolved with a phone call.

18.1 Time limit for claims

Any claim arising out of or relating to the Site or these Terms must be filed within one year after the claim arises, or it is permanently barred, unless a longer period is required by law. Either party may bring a qualifying claim in small claims court instead.

19. Governing law and venue

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The exclusive venue for any action arising out of or relating to the Site or these Terms is the state or federal courts located in Orange County, California, and you consent to personal jurisdiction there. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

20. General provisions

• Changes. We may revise these Terms; the effective date above reflects the current version. Material changes are posted here before they take effect. Continued use of the Site after a revision means you accept it. Changes never apply retroactively to a signed Service Agreement.
• Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, it will be limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in effect.
• No waiver. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
• Independent contractor. Atlas Methods is an independent contractor. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, or employment relationship.
• Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and Atlas Methods regarding the Site, and supersede prior understandings about it. They do not supersede a signed Service Agreement.
• Notices. We give notice by email to the address you gave us, or by posting to this Site. Notices to us go to info@atlasmethods.com. Notice is effective the day it is sent or posted.
• Electronic communications. You consent to receive agreements, notices, disclosures, and records from us electronically, and you agree that an electronic signature or a click-to-accept carries the same effect as a handwritten signature. You may withdraw that consent by emailing us, in which case we may be unable to continue providing some services.
• Survival. Sections 6, 10, 11, and 15 through 19 survive any termination of these Terms or of your use of the Site.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control.

21. California consumer notice

California Civil Code §1789.3 entitles California users of an electronic commercial service to this notice. The provider of this Site is Atlas Methods, Southern California; a mailing address for legal notices is available on request at info@atlasmethods.com. Use of the Site itself carries no charge; fees for services we perform are stated in your Service Agreement. To resolve a complaint, email us first at info@atlasmethods.com. You may also contact the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs in writing at 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or by telephone at (800) 952-5210.

22. Contact us

Atlas Methods · Southern California · Mon–Fri, 9am–5pm PT · info@atlasmethods.com

See also our Privacy Policy and Accessibility Statement.