In effect 14 September 2026
Terms of Service
The agreement for websites we build, host and look after. Written in plain English on purpose — if any of it is unclear, email us and we will explain it, in effect from 14 September 2026.
01Who you are dealing with
Westbound Atlas builds, hosts and maintains websites for local businesses in California. These terms are the agreement between us and you — the business that signs up for a plan. Our mailing address is Westbound Atlas, 2021 Fillmore St PMB 2451, San Francisco, CA 94115. You can reach a real person at jonny@westboundatlas.com.
“You” means the business, and the person signing up confirms they are allowed to agree to this on the business’s behalf.
02What you get
Every plan, monthly or yearly, includes:
- Your website, built and kept online.
- A web address (domain) of your choosing, registered and paid for by us — see clause 6.
- Hosting, the security certificate, backups, and monitoring.
- Every enquiry your contact form receives, delivered to you by email.
Higher tiers add lead delivery by text message, automatic replies, monthly lead reports, and Google Business Profile work. What your own plan includes is what was described to you when you signed up.
A “change” is an edit to what is already there. A new page, a new feature, or a redesign is new work — we will quote it before doing it, and never bill you for it without you agreeing first.
03Price, billing and automatic renewal
Your plan renews automatically — every month, or every year if you chose yearly billing — at the price shown when you signed up, charged to the card you used at checkout, until you cancel it.
Your first payment is taken on the day you sign up — or, if your plan started with a free trial, on the day the trial ends. Each following payment is taken on the same day of the month, or of the year if you pay yearly. The price is the price: there is no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and no charge for anything in clause 2.
Yearly billing is 9 times the monthly price, paid once a year: 12 months for the price of 9. You choose monthly or yearly before checkout, and the amount you agreed to is the amount we charge.
If you start with a free trial: the first 14 days cost nothing. We save your card when you sign up and charge nothing until the trial ends; your site is live on a preview address the whole time, with everything in clause 2 except your own web address, which we register the day your first payment goes through. When the trial ends we charge your plan's price — monthly or yearly, whichever you chose — to the saved card and the plan continues as above. We email you a reminder three days before that happens. Cancel before the trial ends — from your portal, or by telling us — and you are never charged. One free trial per business.
Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or hold your card number. If a payment fails, your site stays online while Stripe retries — we will email you, and we will not take a site down over a failed payment without telling you first (clause 12).
We can change the price of your plan, but not without telling you at least 30 days ahead by email. If you do not want the new price, cancel before it starts and you will never be charged it. A founding rate, if you were given one, is locked for as long as you stay subscribed and is not subject to this clause.
04Cancelling
Cancel any time, yourself, from the Billing page of your portal — no phone call and no explanation needed. You can also text or email us and we will do it for you. Billing stops at the end of the period you have already paid for — the month, or the year if you pay yearly — and your site stays up until then.
There is no minimum term, no notice period and no cancellation fee. We do not refund the period you have already paid for — the month, or the year if you pay yearly — your site stays up for all of it, but we will never bill you again after you cancel.
If you cancel, we take the site offline at the end of the period you have paid for. Your web address is yours to keep (clause 6), and we will send you a copy of your site’s text and photos if you ask for one.
05Going live within 24 hours
We promise your site will be live at your own web address within 24 hours of you choosing that address, or of your first payment going through if you started with a free trial — whichever comes later. Not of you signing up, because we cannot register an address before we know which one, and we do not register it before the trial ends. Weekends and public holidays are included; we mean 24 hours.
If we miss it, your first month is free and we refund it without you having to ask — on a yearly plan, that is one twelfth of your yearly payment. The one exception is a delay we cannot control — a domain registry hold, a transfer from your existing provider, or waiting on information from you.
06Your web address
We buy your web address, we manage it, and we pay for it while you are a customer. It is yours: if you cancel, we will transfer it to you at no charge — just ask, and we will start the transfer within five business days. Once it is in your name you take over the yearly renewal, about $15, paid to whoever you move it to. We will never hold your web address, your words, or your photos to keep you as a customer.
If you already own a web address, it stays yours and we simply point it at your site. We never take ownership of a domain you already hold.
One timing caveat we do not control: a newly bought web address cannot be moved to another provider for 60 days after it is registered. That is an industry rule, not ours. If you cancel inside that window we will start the transfer straight away and finish it the day the lock lifts.
07Who owns what
Yours: your business name, your logo, your photographs, your words, your customer enquiries, and your web address. All of it stays yours, during and after. While you are a customer you give us permission to use it for the one purpose of building and running your site.
Ours: the underlying software, the page templates, and the design system your site is built on. You are licensed to use them while you are a customer; you do not own them, and the site cannot be lifted onto another host as-is. If you leave and want your content, ask and we will send you your text and images.
When you give us photos or text, you are telling us you have the right to use them. If something on your site was not yours to give us, tell us and we will remove it.
08The preview we built before you hired us
We build a working sample of a business’s website before we contact them, using information that is already public — the business’s own website, its public listing, its photographs and its reviews. Nobody asks us to. It is unpaid, and it is how we introduce ourselves.
A preview is never advertised as the real thing: it is blocked from search engines, it is linked nowhere, and the only way to reach it is a link we sent you. Ask us and it comes down within 24 hours, no questions and no follow-up.
We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for any business whose preview we have built, unless and until they hire us.
09Keeping your site up
We aim to keep your site online all the time and we monitor it around the clock, but nobody can promise a website never goes down. We do not offer a guaranteed uptime figure, and we are not liable for outages at our hosting provider, your domain registry, or the wider internet.
What we do promise: if your site is down and you tell us, we start work on it straight away, and if it is down for more than 24 hours in a month because of something on our side, ask and we will credit you that month.
10Enquiries from your website
When someone fills in your contact form we store the message and send it to you. We do our best to deliver every one, immediately — but email and text messages can be delayed, filtered as spam, or rejected by your provider, and we cannot guarantee delivery of every message.
Every enquiry is also kept in your portal, which is the record that does not depend on an email arriving. Check it if you think you have missed something. Those enquiries belong to you; we do not sell them, share them, or contact the people who sent them.
11What we will not put on a website
We will not publish anything unlawful, anything designed to deceive your customers, anything that infringes someone else’s rights, or claims about your business that are not true — including qualifications, licences, insurance or accreditations you do not hold.
You are responsible for the accuracy of what you tell us to publish: your prices, your licence numbers, your service area, your hours.
12Suspension
We may take a site offline if a payment has failed and stayed unpaid for 14 days after we emailed you about it, if the site is being used for something in clause 11, or if we are required to by law. Except where the law requires otherwise, we will always tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.
13Liability
We will do this job properly, and if we get something wrong we will fix it. But there is a limit to what a website business can carry: except where the law does not allow us to limit it, our total liability to you for anything arising out of this agreement is capped at the total amount you paid us in the three months before the problem arose.
We are not liable for lost profits, lost business, or lost custom. Nothing here limits liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.
14Your privacy, and your customers’
What we collect and why is set out in our privacy policy. Each site we run also carries its own privacy policy for the people who use its contact form.
Enquiries submitted through your site are handled by us on your behalf and for no other purpose. We do not use them to market to anyone, and we do not sell personal information.
15Changes to these terms
If we change these terms in a way that matters to you, we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect. Carrying on as a customer after that means you accept the new terms; if you would rather not, cancel before they start and nothing changes for you.
Small corrections that do not change the deal — a typo, a clearer sentence — we just make.
16Which law applies
This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of California, and any dispute belongs in the state or federal courts of California.
Before that: email support@westboundatlas.com and give us a fair chance to sort it out. We would much rather fix a problem than argue about one.
17The rest
These terms, plus the plan details you were shown when you signed up, are the whole agreement. If a court finds one clause unenforceable, the rest still stands. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to.
You cannot transfer this agreement to someone else without asking us — though if you sell your business, we will almost certainly say yes.