Terms & Conditions

01.Parties#

These terms are between:

• WithSeismic — Doug Silkstone, sole trader, operating from Prague, Czech Republic, contact doug@withseismic.com ("I", "me", "my practice"); and
• You — the individual or organisation engaging me, or browsing this site (the "Client" or "you").

By engaging me or by signing an SOW with me, you accept these terms.

02.Scope of services#

I take on a narrow band of work:

• Founding-engineer and fractional-CTO engagements;
• MVP builds — typically time-boxed at four weeks;
• AI workflows and automation, including agent and LLM-orchestration work;
• Chrome extensions and adjacent tooling;
• Open-source contributions, both standalone and as part of a paid engagement; and
• Technical advisory on architecture, hiring, and product sequencing.

The specific scope for any engagement is set out in an SOW or a written engagement email — what I'm building, what's out of scope, what "done" looks like, what I need from you, and the timeline. If something isn't in the SOW, it isn't in the engagement.

03.Engagement model and payment#

Unless we agree otherwise in writing:

• Engagements are usually time-boxed (a four-week MVP cadence is the default) or run as a weekly retainer.
• Fees are fixed for a defined deliverable or weekly for a retainer.
• For fixed-fee MVP work I typically invoice 50% on commencement and 50% on delivery. For retainers I invoice weekly or monthly in advance.
• Invoices are payable within 14 days of issue, by bank transfer to the account on the invoice, in the currency stated on the invoice.
• Late payments accrue statutory interest in line with Czech law (Government Regulation No. 351/2013 Coll.), and I reserve the right to pause work on overdue invoices after written notice.
• All fees are exclusive of applicable taxes; VAT is applied where required.
• Travel, third-party software, and similar pass-through costs are billed at cost and only with prior written approval.

04.Intellectual property#

This is the section that matters most, so I've kept it explicit.

• Bespoke deliverables. Code, designs, and documents that I write specifically for you under an SOW transfer to you on full payment of all amounts due under that SOW. Until then, the deliverables remain my property and you have no licence to use them in production.
• Pre-existing materials. I bring prior tools, libraries, snippets, methodologies, and templates with me into every engagement. These remain my property. I grant you a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use those pre-existing materials as embedded in your bespoke deliverables, for your own business purposes. You may not extract them and resell them as a standalone product.
• Third-party assets. Any stock images, fonts, or paid libraries used in deliverables are licensed under their own terms; you assume the cost of any ongoing licences once the deliverable transfers.
• Showcasing. I may describe the engagement as a case study (name, brief, deliverable, outcome) on withseismic.com and in pitch material unless you opt out in writing. I will not publish confidential information, screenshots of unreleased product, or anything you've asked me to keep private.

Open-source components. A meaningful share of the work I do touches open-source software.

• Open-source components included in your deliverables are licensed to you under their own original licences (typically permissive licences such as MIT or Apache-2.0). Nothing in these terms changes those licences.
• If, in the course of an engagement, I make a contribution upstream to a third-party open-source project, that contribution is governed by the upstream project's licence and contribution policy, not by this contract — and may therefore be public.
• I may also release my own generic tooling (developed independently or generalised from work I've done) as open source under permissive licences. That tooling is mine to release; the licence ships with it.

If we want any of this carved out for a specific engagement — for example, you want a contribution kept private, or you want certain components dual-licensed — we'll handle it in the SOW.

05.Confidentiality#

Each side agrees to treat the other's non-public information as confidential and to use it only for the purposes of the engagement. This obligation survives termination for three years.

Standard carve-outs apply: information that is or becomes public through no fault of the receiving party, information independently developed without reference to the disclosing party's confidential information, information already known prior to disclosure, and information required to be disclosed by law or court order (with notice to the other party where lawful).

Open-source contributions made under section 4 are, by their nature, public, and are not breaches of this confidentiality clause.

06.Warranties and disclaimers#

I warrant that I will perform the services with reasonable skill and care consistent with prevailing professional standards in the industry.

Beyond that, deliverables are provided "as is" once accepted. I do not warrant that:

• the deliverables will be free from bugs;
• the deliverables are fit for any particular purpose beyond what is expressly described in the SOW;
• the deliverables will achieve any specific commercial outcome; or
• third-party services that the deliverables depend on (LLM APIs, payment providers, hosting, etc.) will remain available, unchanged, or backwards-compatible.

If something I shipped breaks within 30 days of delivery because of a defect in my work — not because of a third-party API change, an environment change, or a feature you decided to add later — tell me and I'll fix it without further charge. After 30 days, fixes are billable.

07.Limitation of liability#

To the maximum extent permitted by Czech and EU law, my total aggregate liability to you under or in connection with an engagement, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), or otherwise, is capped at the total fees you have actually paid me in the six months preceding the event giving rise to the claim.

I am not liable for:

• indirect, consequential, or special losses;
• lost profits, lost revenue, lost contracts, or lost goodwill;
• loss of data, except to the extent caused directly by my breach;
• losses caused by third-party services I integrated with at your request; or
• losses arising from your use of the deliverable beyond its agreed scope.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, or gross negligence (hrubá nedbalost) under Czech law.

08.Termination#

Either party may terminate an engagement on fourteen (14) days' written notice, or immediately for material breach that hasn't been cured within fourteen days of written notice describing the breach.

On termination:

• you pay for all work performed up to the termination date, including any accrued time on retainer;
• I deliver work-in-progress in the state it's in;
• IP transfer rules in section 4 apply only to fully paid deliverables;
• confidentiality (section 5) and limitation of liability (section 7) survive termination.

09.Acceptable use of this website#

A few common-sense rules for the site itself:

• Don't scrape the site in a way that consumes resources beyond what a normal browser would.
• Don't try to reverse-engineer, decompile, or otherwise extract source from anything served here, except to the extent permitted by law.
• Don't use the site to transmit malware, run vulnerability scans, or otherwise interfere with how it works for other people.
• Open-source code I publish on GitHub is separate from this site and is governed by its own licence — usually MIT — found in the repository.

I reserve the right to block access from IPs or networks that ignore the above.

10.Governing law and jurisdiction#

These terms, and any non-contractual obligations arising out of them, are governed by the laws of the Czech Republic.

Any dispute that cannot be resolved by good-faith discussion will be submitted to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Prague, Czech Republic. If you're a consumer rather than a business, you keep any mandatory rights you have under the law of your country of residence — those are not displaced by this clause.

11.Changes to these terms#

I version these terms. Material changes bump the version number and the date at the top of this page. The terms in force at the time you sign an SOW are the terms that apply to that SOW for its full duration, regardless of later changes here.