Qualforge

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Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of the Qualforge website and the services provided by Qualforge Ltd ("Qualforge", "we", "us"). By using our site, booking a call, or engaging our services, you agree to these terms.

If you become a client, you also sign a client agreement and an order form. Those documents are the full terms of what you buy. This page is the plain-English version of them, and where this page and your client agreement differ, your client agreement governs. The clause numbers in brackets below are that agreement's, so you can look up the full wording.

What we sell

Qualforge builds, owns and runs a hosted AI service for small businesses. It is sold as a package: Core (Quinn, Piper and Marcus), Core with one or more of the add-on agents Nora, Theo and Isla, or all six together as the whole back office. A website is a separate extra, bought on its own or alongside any package. Managed AI is the monthly service that runs every package.

This page describes the range of what we offer. It is not a list of what you get. Before we begin building, we send you a written order form setting out the package, the agents supplied, whether a website is included, the fees and the dates. Anything not written on your order form or its annex is not part of your service and is not charged for (clause 8.2). An agent not listed there is not supplied (clause 4.6). That order form and its annex, together with your client agreement, form our agreement with you. If anything on it is not what you expected, tell us before we start and we will correct it or refund you in full.

What you are buying, and what you are not

You are subscribing to a service we own and run. You are not buying it (clause 5.1). The monthly fee is what keeps your system running, and the one-off build fee pays for the work of building and configuring it. The two are one package and cannot be bought apart (clause 7.1), and if Managed AI ends for any reason, the service stops working (clause 7.3). That is how the service is built rather than a penalty, and your client agreement says the same thing in the same words.

Your own data is a different thing and it is yours (clause 20.1). You can take a full copy at any time, and we return it and delete our copy when you leave. The section on your data below sets out how.

Calls before you buy

Any call before you buy is provided to help you understand your options. They carry no obligation to buy and create no commitment on either side until a paid engagement is agreed.

Pricing and payment

• Our standard prices are: Core £1,200; each add-on agent £300; all six together £2,100; a website £650; and Managed AI £145 a month on every package, plus £30 a month for each extra van (clause 12.2A). Your order form records the package, any add-on agents, any website, and the price for each, and the order form is what governs (clause 12.1). The prices on it are the prices: no discount codes, no free months and no struck-through prices (clause 12.14).
• An add-on agent costs £300 whether you add it when you sign or later, and adding one does not change your monthly (clause 8.4).
• The build fee is paid by card through a Stripe link when you order, either in full or, if you choose, in 3 equal monthly payments, the first when you order, with no interest and no charges, so the total is the same (clause 12.3). We send your agreement the same day and start building only once we have both signed. If we have not both signed within fourteen days, or you ask before then, we refund you in full (clause 1.2). It is not discounted. The payment plan covers agent builds only: a website is always paid in full when you sign (clauses 12.3 and 13.2).
• Managed AI is £145 a month, the fee written on your order form, with no free months (clauses 12.2 and 12.4). It applies to every package, and it is compulsory rather than an add-on. A website bought on its own contains no agent, so it carries no monthly at all. It is paid once, with nothing recurring and nothing to cancel.
• The monthly is payable in advance. Your first month falls due on go-live, the day we hand the service over to you, not the day you sign. It is the same day the thirty-day guarantee starts (clauses 12.4 and 14.2).
• Payments are taken by card through Stripe. By paying, you also accept Stripe's own terms. We do not see or store your full card details.
• Your card is saved with Stripe when you pay. From go-live we take £145 a month from it on the same date each month (plus £30 for each extra van on your order form), any remaining plan payments on their dates, and any charged minutes after we have sent the invoice (clause 12.6A).
• Recurring services renew monthly until you cancel. There is no minimum term, no notice period and no cancellation fee (clause 15.2).
• We may charge interest on an overdue sum at 4% a year above the Bank of England base rate (clause 12.9).

VAT

• Every price we quote, on this site, on your order form and on any invoice, is exclusive of VAT (clause 12.5(a)). A figure given without qualification is a figure before VAT.
• Qualforge Ltd is not registered for VAT. No VAT is charged and none is shown on an invoice, so the stated fee is the whole of the cash payable today (clause 12.5(b)).
• We expect to be required to register during your term, because the UK registration threshold is taxable turnover of £90,000 in any rolling twelve months and our own projections cross it. We tell you that before you sign rather than after (clause 12.5(c)).
• If we register, VAT is added to the stated fee at the rate in force. It is not absorbed by it and not taken out of it (clause 12.5(d)). That applies to the build fee, the monthly, charged voice minutes and anything else payable.
• We will tell you in writing as soon as we know our registration date, and always before we send you an invoice carrying VAT. We do not promise a fixed period of notice, because registration can be required at short notice on a forward look and a promise of thirty days could not always be kept (clause 12.5(e)).
• If you are VAT registered yourself you recover it. If you are not, you pay twenty per cent more in cash for the same service. We would rather say so here than let you find out on an invoice (clause 12.5(g)). Adding VAT is not a price rise by us, and you can cancel at any time, with no notice and no fee.
• Any other tax, levy or statutory charge introduced during your term is treated the same way (clause 12.5(h)).

Voice minutes

Where your order form records an agent that answers the telephone, your monthly includes an allowance of voice minutes. Your order form records the allowance and the per-minute rate that apply to you (clause 12.13), and a larger business can be quoted a larger allowance. The standard allowance is 150 answered minutes a month, and the standard rate above it is 60p a minute. Nothing above your allowance is charged unless the rate is on the order form you signed.

• Only calls we actually answer count. Missed calls, unanswered calls, calls that fail to connect and test calls do not.
• We add up the seconds used across the month and round once at the end. We do not round each call up.
• Unused included minutes do not carry into the next month. Minutes bought in advance in a bundle do not expire, and we use them before charging you.
• We tell you once when you have used 80% of your minutes, and again when charged minutes begin, and you can see the position at any time from your own sign-in.
• Your agent does not stop answering when the allowance runs out. We set no hard ceiling unless you ask us for one in writing.
• Charged minutes are invoiced after the month has ended, on their own invoice, showing the minutes, the rate, the total and the number of answered calls behind it. We do not take them from your card before you have had the invoice.
• If you think a charged minute is wrong, tell us within sixty days and we will send you the call records behind it within five working days. You do not pay the disputed amount while we are looking at it, and anything we cannot evidence is credited.
• The rate is not a pass-through and does not move with what our own suppliers charge us (clause 12.13(j)).

Nothing else is charged for use. The AI model processing, the messaging, the hosting and the telephony are our costs, not yours (clause 4.4).

What Managed AI covers

For £145 a month we host your instance, back it up daily, monitor it, maintain it, apply updates to the software and to your agents, tune them as your business changes within the scope on your order form, pay for the AI model usage, and support you by email (clause 18.2).

• We reply to a support request within one working day, and within four working hours to a request you mark urgent because the service is not working at all, where it reaches us between 09:00 and 17:00 on a working day. A reply means a person acknowledging it and saying what is being done, not always a fix (clause 18.3).
• We give no uptime figure and no availability commitment (clause 18.4). We do not promise the service will be uninterrupted or error free.
• We may take the service out of use for maintenance, with reasonable notice where we can give it, kept as short as we can and outside working hours where that is practical.
• We may change how the service works, including the underlying model or method, provided the change does not materially reduce what your order form records as supplied (clause 18.7).
• If part of your service is not working as your order form or the service description says it should, we put it right at no extra charge (clause 18.8).

Our commitment and results

Your build is complete when everything recorded on your order form and its annex has been delivered and works as it describes. Until that point we keep working at no extra cost to you, however long it takes (clause 9.6). The annex is the whole of that commitment: anything you ask for that is not on it is a separate piece of work, and we quote it before we do it.

Any timescale we give you is an honest working target, not a guarantee (clause 9.2). It is not a term of our agreement, and we may decline to give one at all. Where progress depends on access, information or approvals from you, the timing moves with them.

We do not guarantee any commercial outcome (clause 30.2). We do not promise a number of enquiries, calls answered or bookings, a conversion rate, a search ranking, a revenue figure or a saving of time or cost. Any example, figure or case study we have shown you is illustrative only.

The thirty-day guarantee

It is a guarantee, not a trial (clause 14.1). You buy the service when you sign, and the guarantee is what we do if we got it wrong.

• It runs for thirty days from go-live, the day we hand the service over to you, not from when you sign or pay (clause 14.2).
• It covers an agent not doing what your order form and the service description say it does, where the failure is material. Tell us in writing inside the thirty days. If we have not put it right within five working days, we refund the agent build fee in full (clauses 14.3 and 14.7).
• It does not cover a change of mind, a change in your own circumstances, a problem caused by information or access we needed and did not get, or any commercial result (clause 14.4). A change of mind is covered by the fourteen days and the refund before we start, both set out below.
• Every call the voice agent handles is recorded, and we tell you so before you sign. We will give you the recording or transcript of any call, so a claim is settled by both of us looking at the same record (clause 14.5).
• The website fee is not part of the guarantee, and a monthly already paid is not refunded, because the service ran during that month (clause 14.7). Any plan payment not yet made stops being due. Your agreement then ends, and we run an export of your data with you first (clause 14.8).
• An add-on agent delivered after go-live has its own thirty days, from the day we tell you in writing that it is live, and the refund is the price of that add-on (clause 14.9).

Your responsibilities

• Provide accurate information and the access or materials we reasonably need to deliver the service.
• Respond to requests in good time, so the work is not held up.
• Keep your sign-in credentials secure, and use the service only for your own business.
• Keep a valid payment method on file, and update it before it expires.
• Where our agents contact people on your behalf, make sure you have a lawful basis for contacting them, and never ask us to contact somebody who has opted out (clause 24). The people our agents contact are your contacts, not ours.
• Check what an agent produces before you rely on it (clause 27). AI output can be wrong, and it does not replace your own judgement on a quote, a price or a commitment to a customer.

We do not ask you for a testimonial, a review of us, a case study or a reference call as part of your agreement, and we will not use your name or logo in our publicity without your written consent (clause 19.4).

Intellectual property

Our systems, methods and underlying tooling remain ours. What we sell is a licence to use a platform we own, build, host and operate, for as long as your agreement runs. It is not a sale, and paying does not transfer ownership of any part of the platform to you (clauses 5.1, 5.2 and 6.1). That includes the software, your instance, the agents, the prompts and configuration, any website template, and any telephone number or third party account we buy in order to run the service for you.

The build fee is a fee for work (clause 5.3). It pays for the work of building and configuring your system. It does not buy the system, any part of it, or any continuing right to use it after the monthly stops.

Anything you already own and give us stays yours (clause 5.5), including your brand, your logo, your copy, your price list, your photographs, your domain name, your customer records and any telephone number you already held. We use that material only to provide the service to you.

Where we build you a website, your domain name is and stays yours, and on exit we give you a copy of the text and images and release any DNS control we hold on your written instruction. The site itself, its template, its code and its design remain ours, and we stop hosting it when your service ends (clauses 5.2(f) and 34.5).

Where we procured a telephone number in order to run the service for you, that number is ours (clause 5.2(e)). If you ask within thirty days of leaving, we will not reallocate it to anyone else and we will cooperate with a request to port it to your own carrier account at your cost, where the carrier permits it. We cannot promise a port is possible (clause 34.6). A number you already held before you signed remains yours throughout.

Your data

Your data is yours and we claim no ownership of it (clause 20.1).

• We hold it on your own single-tenant instance, with its own database. It is not pooled with any other client's data (clause 20.2).
• We do not sell it, do not use it for our own marketing, and do not use it to train any general purpose AI model (clause 20.3).
• You can take a full copy at any time, from your own sign-in, without asking us and without charge (clause 21.1). That right does not depend on you leaving and does not depend on your account being in good standing. If the self-service export is unavailable for any reason, we produce the same export by hand at no charge within five working days (clause 21.8).
• The export is a single archive of CSV files that open in any spreadsheet, covering contacts and enquiries, pipeline, tasks, outreach records, documents, the agent roster and the activity log, with a plain-English guide to each file (clause 21.2).
• Before your service ends we run an export with you on a call and confirm you hold a complete copy before anything is disabled (clause 21.5).
• Thirty days after your agreement ends we permanently delete your data from the database, the server and the encrypted backups, and we send you written confirmation with a numbered deletion certificate (clauses 22.1 and 22.3). Your sign-in keeps working until deletion day so you can take a further copy.
• After deletion we keep only the deletion certificate and export log, invoices and payment records for the period tax law requires, our own correspondence with you, and the minimum needed to keep honouring an opt-out (clause 22.4).
• The export contains your data. It does not contain the software, the configuration or any prompt (clause 21.7).
• Please keep your own copy by taking exports at intervals that suit your business (clause 31.7).

How we handle personal data is set out in your client agreement and its data protection schedule, which govern on anything to do with personal data (clause 23.1).

Refunds

• Before we start. If you tell us you do not want to go ahead at any point before we have begun the build work, we refund the build fee and any website fee in full, with no reason needed and no deduction. We tell you in writing on the day the work begins, so this point is never in doubt (clause 12.10).
• The first fourteen days. For fourteen days from the day we both sign, you can cancel for any reason and we refund the build fee and any website fee in full, with any monthly already taken, and any plan payment not yet made stops being due. The only deduction is where you asked us in writing to start early and we did, in which case we keep a proportionate charge for the work done and tell you how we worked it out (clause 16.8).
• After we start. Once the fourteen days have run and we have begun, the build fee is not refundable, because it is a fee for work, except under the thirty-day guarantee above (clause 14). If part of your system is not working as we described it, we fix it at no extra cost (clause 18.8).
• The monthly. There is no fixed term. Cancel whenever you like and it stops at the end of the month you have already paid for. We do not refund part-months, because the service runs for the whole of the month (clause 16.3). If you are paying the build fee in 3 payments, any payment not yet made is still due when you cancel after the fourteen days (clause 16.5).
• If we end your agreement on sixty days notice and you are not in breach, we take no further monthly, refund any monthly paid for a period after the end date, and cancel any plan payment not yet due. The build fee already paid is not refunded, because the work was done (clause 33.4).

Cancellation

You can cancel at any time by emailing team@qualforge.co.uk from the address on your order form. No notice period, no cancellation fee, and no particular form of words (clauses 16.1 and 37.6). We acknowledge it in writing within one working day and confirm the date the service stops.

Cancellation takes effect at the end of the month you have already paid for. Nothing is switched off before then (clause 16.2), and we run an export with you first. Cancelling is not a breach, carries no penalty of any kind, and never leads to a suspension (clause 16.7). Because Managed AI and the build are one package, cancelling Managed AI ends the agreement, and the service stops at that point (clauses 16.4 and 7.3).

If a payment fails

This is not what happens when you cancel, and a client who cancels never reaches any of it (clause 17). It applies where a payment fails and we do not hear from you.

• We tell you in writing on the day, and we say what happens next and on which date. We will not let you run into a suspension unwarned.
• You have five working days to pay. Nothing is switched off during them.
• Talking to us counts. If you get in touch inside those five working days and explain, we can agree a different arrangement in writing (clause 17.4). We would far rather hear from you in a difficult month than switch anything off, and you are not suspended while an arrangement is being discussed in good faith.
• After those five working days we may suspend the service. The agents stop, but your instance, your database and all your data are preserved, and your sign-in keeps working, so you can read and export everything throughout.
• You can lift a suspension at any time by paying what is owed. There is no reinstatement charge and nothing is lost (clause 17.6).
• For thirty days from suspension we will produce a full export for you at no charge, whether or not anything is owed.
• If a suspension runs for thirty days we may end the agreement, and your data is deleted thirty days after that. Your sign-in works until deletion day so you can take a further copy.
• You can cancel at any point during this, which stops the sequence going further, subject to anything already due remaining due (clause 17.12).

Liability

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited (clause 31.1).

Subject to that, our total liability arising out of or in connection with your agreement is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose and £2,400 (clause 31.4). Neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, revenue, business, contract, goodwill or anticipated savings (clause 31.2).

Loss or corruption of your data is not excluded (clause 31.3). We accept liability for it where it is caused by our breach or negligence, subject to that cap and to your keeping reasonably recent exports of your own (clause 31.7).

A claim must be notified to the other party in writing, with reasonable particulars, within twelve months of first becoming aware of the circumstances behind it (clause 31.8).

Where you are a consumer in law, nothing here excludes or limits your statutory rights (clauses 30.7 and 39.9).

Complaints

If you are unhappy with any part of the service, email team@qualforge.co.uk. We acknowledge a complaint within two working days and give you a substantive written response within ten working days. If we need longer we will say so, say why, and respond within a further ten working days (clause 38). If something is still unresolved, we will both try to settle it in discussion before anyone raises proceedings.

Governing law

These terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of them, are governed by the law of Scotland, and the courts of Scotland have exclusive jurisdiction (clause 40).

Contact

Questions about these terms? Email team@qualforge.co.uk.