Payment & Cancellation Policy

The default schedule is: 20% at kickoff, 30% after you approve the homepage or design direction, and 50% before launch or transfer.

Unusually small, large, or complex projects may use a different structure — your written agreement always states the exact schedule before anything is paid.

Project scheduling, discovery, requirements review, research, the sitemap or content structure, technical setup, and the initial design direction. This is the work that turns your quote request into a concrete plan.

The homepage or primary visual direction, the included revisions for that phase, and your approval for the full build to continue. It's invoiced after you've seen and approved the design — not before.

The remaining website build, the included final revisions, your staging review, final quality checks, and launch preparation. It's requested once the finished site is ready for you to review on staging.

Each milestone comes with an invoice email containing a payment reference. You can pay online through our Pay an Invoice page — payment is processed by Stripe, and we never see or store your card details. Before checkout you'll see the milestone, the amount, and a summary of what it covers.

Final launch, transfer of the site and source files, credentials, and domain connection are completed after the final balance has cleared. Everything up to that point — including the full staging review — happens first, so you're never asked to pay for something you haven't seen.

You may cancel at any time by telling us in writing — an email is enough.

When you cancel: completed and in-progress phases remain payable; future phases that haven't begun are not owed; nonrecoverable third-party expenses (domains, subscriptions, purchases made for your project) remain your responsibility; and the work completed up to cancellation can be delivered to you once all earned balances are paid.

If we end the project because we can't deliver the agreed scope, you'll be refunded for anything paid toward work we haven't delivered. Details are in the Refund Policy.

If an invoice is overdue, we may pause work until it's paid. We'll always tell you before pausing — surprises help nobody.

If we go 30 days without a response from you, we may close or archive the project. Restarting an archived project may require a new schedule or a restart fee, since your original production slot will have been released.

Refunds follow the same phase logic as payments: earned phases are paid for, unstarted phases aren't owed, and amounts paid toward unstarted work may be refundable. The full rules, including nonrecoverable expenses and how refunds are issued, are on the Refund Policy page.

Anything unclear before you pay a milestone? Email admin@harborlineco.org and we'll walk you through it.