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Legal
The rules we work under. Written to be read once and understood, not to be survived with a lawyer beside you.
Last updated August 14, 2026
These terms are between FrontCanvas, a design studio operating from 3120 Oak Valley Dr, Ann Arbor, MI 48103, and you — whether you are simply reading this site, or you have hired us to build something. Using the site means you accept these terms. Paying an invoice means you accept them for the work as well.
We redesign websites for restaurants. Our process runs backwards compared to most studios: we find a restaurant whose food deserves better than its website, we design a full concept at our own expense, and then we send it. Nothing is charged, and nothing is expected, until you have already seen what we would build.
If you want it built for real, we offer three things:
What each one includes is listed on the pricing page, and that list is part of this agreement. If we quote you something different, the written quote wins.
The concept costs nothing and obliges you to nothing. It is a design concept, not a finished website — it demonstrates what your site could look like, and some parts of it are illustrative rather than functional.
We build it from information your restaurant already publishes: your menu, your photographs, your hours, your listings. We use that material for the single purpose of showing you a proposal. Your name, logo, and photographs remain entirely yours, and making a concept gives us no rights over them. The concept is published only at a random, unlisted address sent to you, excluded from search engines, and removed on request.
If you would rather we did not hold the concept at all, tell us and we delete it. No argument, no retention email.
This is the part most studios make deliberately murky, so read it closely.
Until an invoice is paid in full, everything we made — the layout, the design files, the code, the photography treatment, the words we wrote — remains our property. You are welcome to look at it, sleep on it, and show it to your business partner or your family. You may not publish it, sell it, or hand it to another developer to build from. If that happens, the work is no longer free and we will invoice for it.
When the final invoice is settled, ownership of the deliverables for your project — the design files, the page code written for you, the images we produced for you, and the copy we wrote for you — transfers to you outright, worldwide and permanently. We will confirm that in writing if you ask, and we will hand over the files without charging a release fee.
The general toolkit we carry from job to job — our component library, our internal frameworks, our working methods — remains ours. You receive a permanent, unrestricted licence to keep using it as part of your website, forever, including if you later move to another developer.
Fonts, stock photography, and third-party plugins arrive with their own licences, which we pass on to you. We will always tell you which parts those are and what they cost before we use them.
We would like to show your finished site in our portfolio and in outreach to other restaurants. If you would rather we did not, say so at any point and we will take it down. There is no clause here forcing you to be a case study.
Prices are as listed on the pricing page on the day you accept a quote. For one-time projects, 50% is due as a deposit before work begins, and the balance is due when the site goes live:
Care is $89 per month, charged on the same date each month until you cancel. It is a subscription, and it says so on the invoice.
Payment is taken through Stripe. We never see or store your card number. Sales tax is added where the law requires it. If a balance is unpaid, the finished site stays on our staging server rather than going live — we will not take a site down that is already running, and we will not hold your domain hostage.
Refunds, cancellations, and what happens if you change your mind halfway are covered in full on the refunds and cancellation page, which forms part of these terms.
Each project includes a set number of revision rounds:
A round means one consolidated list of changes, sent in one go. Sending three separate emails over three days about the same page is still one round — we are not counting against you. What uses a round is a fresh pass over the design after you have seen the previous one.
Work beyond the included rounds, or a change of direction after a design is approved, is quoted in writing before we touch it. You will never receive a surprise invoice.
If we deliver a round and hear nothing for ten business days, we treat it as approved and move to the next stage. Otherwise projects drift forever, and drifting projects are how restaurants end up with the bad website they already had.
If we cannot reach you for thirty days, the project is paused. After sixty days it is closed, and the refunds page governs what happens to money already paid. You can restart a closed project at any time, and we will not charge you again for work already done.
A working restaurant website leans on other companies: your domain registrar, hosting, an online ordering platform, a reservation system, Google. We set these up for you and we know how they behave, but we do not own them. Their terms, their fees, and their outages are theirs. Where an ongoing fee is paid to them rather than to us — domain renewal after the first year, ordering platform commissions — we will tell you the amount before you commit.
Care covers unlimited content edits: menus, prices, hours, photographs, seasonal specials, holiday notices. Send us the change and it is done that week.
What it does not cover is new work dressed up as an edit — a new page type, a new booking system, a full redesign. Those get quoted separately, and we will say so plainly rather than quietly slowing down your requests. Cancel any time; the refunds page explains exactly what happens to the month in progress.
You can stop at any point, for any reason, without explaining yourself. Money already paid is handled by the refunds page.
We may decline a project or stop work if an invoice goes unpaid, if we are asked to publish something unlawful or deceptive, or if someone is abusive to us. If we stop work for our own reasons, we refund everything we have not yet earned, and we say why.
Whenever things end, you keep whatever you have paid for in full, and we keep the work that was never paid for.
For thirty days after your site goes live, we fix defects in our own work at no charge — broken links, layout faults, anything that does not behave the way we said it would.
We do not promise business outcomes. Not a number of new customers, not a position in Google results, not a revenue figure. A better website helps, sometimes a great deal, but anyone selling you a guaranteed ranking is either guessing or lying. Beyond what is explicitly written in these terms, the service is provided as it is.
If something goes wrong and it is our fault, our total liability is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the problem arose. We are not liable for indirect losses — lost profit, lost bookings, lost data held by someone else — to the extent the law allows us to say so.
Nothing here limits liability for fraud, for deliberate wrongdoing, or for anything that cannot lawfully be limited. We are not trying to sneak past those.
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Michigan, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules.
Before anything formal happens, write to contact@frontcanvas.com and give us thirty days to put it right. In our experience that resolves it, because we would rather fix a problem than win an argument.
If it cannot be resolved that way, the state and federal courts serving Washtenaw County, Michigan have jurisdiction, and we both agree to that venue. Small claims court remains open to either of us for anything that qualifies.
We may update this page. The version that governs your project is the one published on the day you paid your deposit — later changes do not apply retroactively to work already agreed. If we make a significant change, we email active clients rather than expecting you to notice.
If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given up the right to enforce it later. You may not transfer this agreement to someone else without asking us first, although we will not be unreasonable about it if you sell the restaurant. These terms, the pricing page, the refunds page, and any written quote are the whole agreement between us.
Anything about these terms goes to contact@frontcanvas.com, or by post to 3120 Oak Valley Dr, Ann Arbor, MI 48103.
These are our standard terms, not scripture. If a clause does not work for your restaurant, tell us before you sign anything.