Terms of Use

These terms set out what you can do with this website — the articles, the free online tools, the newsletter and the forms — and what you can expect from us in return. They are written in ordinary English on purpose, because terms nobody can read protect nobody. Browsing the site means you accept them, so the five minutes it takes to read this page is time well spent.

1. Who these terms are between

This website is published and run by App Developer, an independent software development practice. On this page, "we", "us" and "our" mean that business. "You" means anyone who visits the site, reads an article, uses one of the free tools, subscribes to the newsletter, applies for a role or sends a message through a form.

These terms cover the website and everything published on it. They do not replace the proposal and scope document signed for a paid project. Where the website and a signed agreement ever disagree about a specific engagement, the signed agreement wins for that engagement, every time.

2. Accepting these terms

By opening any page here you confirm that you have read these terms, that you are legally able to agree to them, and that you accept them in full. There is no checkbox to tick, because using the site is the acceptance.

If any part of this page does not work for you, the honest answer is to stop using the website rather than to use it on different terms. If a single clause is the problem, write to us before you leave. Several paragraphs on this page exist because a reader asked a fair question about an earlier version.

3. Who can use this website

The site is written for developers, founders and business owners, and it is not aimed at children. You need to be at least 16 years old to subscribe to the newsletter, submit a form, or send us any personal information. Everything else — reading an article, using a calculator — carries no age requirement beyond being old enough to agree to these terms where you live.

4. What you are welcome to do

Most of this site exists to be used, so the permissions below are given freely and do not require you to write and ask first:

• Read, print and save any article for your own use, at work or at home.
• Share links to any page anywhere, including in paid newsletters, courses and internal documentation.
• Quote up to roughly 90 words from an article, provided the quote is marked as a quote and carries a visible link back to the original page.
• Copy the code samples printed inside articles into your own projects, commercial ones included, with no attribution and no licence fee.
• Use the free online tools for real work, including client work you are paid for, with no watermark, no sign up and no credit required.
• Reference the pricing figures published here in an internal budget or a comparison document.

5. What is not allowed

The list below is short and it is the whole list. Nothing here is meant to catch you out; each line describes something that either harms the site or misleads a reader:

• Republishing whole articles, or lightly rewritten versions of them, under another name or on another domain.
• Translating an article and publishing the translation without written permission.
• Presenting the free tools as your own product, embedding them in your own site, or reselling access to them.
• Scraping, mirroring or bulk downloading the site, or hitting it hard enough to slow it down for anyone else.
• Working around rate limits, security controls or the admin area, or testing the site's security without written permission.
• Sending spam, malware, or unlawful material through any form, and using a form to impersonate somebody else.
• Using the site in a way that breaks the law where you are, or that infringes anyone's rights.

6. The free online tools

Almost every tool published here does its work inside your browser using JavaScript on your own machine. For those tools, what you type and the files you open never leave your device and never reach our server, so there is nothing for us to store, log or lose. Where a tool does need to send something to a server, the tool page says so plainly before you use it.

The tools are offered for convenience and without any warranty of accuracy or fitness for a particular purpose. Check any result before you rely on it, and check it twice before using one in a financial, medical, legal, structural or engineering context. They are built carefully, they are used daily, and they are still no substitute for professional judgement.

Tools may be changed, renamed or withdrawn at any time. If one you rely on disappears, ask and we will usually tell you what replaced it.

7. Articles, tutorials and code samples

Articles here describe what worked on real projects at the time of writing. Frameworks move, APIs get deprecated and prices change, so treat an article as a snapshot with a date on it rather than a permanent instruction. Nothing published here is professional advice for your specific situation, and following a tutorial is a decision you make as the engineer responsible for your own system.

Code samples printed inside articles are yours to use without asking or crediting anyone. They are provided as they are, without warranty, and they are written to demonstrate an idea rather than to be pasted into production untouched. Read them, understand them, and add the error handling your own project needs before shipping.

8. Intellectual property

The articles, illustrations, photography, page layouts, the design of this site and the name it trades under belong to App Developer unless a page says otherwise. Third party logos, product screenshots and trade marks belong to their owners and appear here for identification only.

The permissions in section 4 are the licence you have. Anything beyond them — republication, translation, syndication, bundling content into a paid product, or training a commercial model on the archive — needs written permission, which is usually given for reasonable requests. Ask before you build something on top of it, not after.

9. Automated access and AI training

Search engine crawlers, feed readers and archive services are welcome, and the site's robots file is the authoritative statement on what they may fetch. Ordinary crawling at a sensible rate is fine and always has been.

Bulk extraction for the purpose of training or fine tuning a commercial model is a different thing, and it is not permitted without written permission. This is not hostility towards machine learning; it is the same rule that applies to a publisher who wants to reprint the archive. Ask, describe what you want to use and why, and expect a real answer rather than a form response.

10. Anything you send us

When you send a message, a brief, a job application or a bug report, you keep ownership of what you wrote. You give us permission to store it, read it, reply to it and keep it for as long as the Privacy Policy says, and you confirm you had the right to send it in the first place.

Please do not send confidential material through the contact form. Send a sentence describing what you have and a mutual non disclosure agreement can be signed before anything sensitive changes hands. Ideas sent without an agreement in place are treated as non confidential, which protects both of us: we work on similar problems for many clients and cannot promise never to build something adjacent to an idea somebody emailed us unprompted.

11. The newsletter

Subscribing is optional and unsubscribing takes one click from any issue, with no confirmation step, no survey and no final offer. We send new articles, occasional tool releases and the odd note about what changed in the stack. We do not sell, rent or share the list, and we do not send anything on behalf of anyone else. Addresses that bounce repeatedly are removed automatically to keep the list honest.

12. The affiliate programme

If you join the affiliate programme, you get a referral link that credits you when somebody you sent arrives and later becomes a client. Attribution uses a cookie that lasts 60 days, described in detail in the Privacy Policy.

Commission rates, payment timing and the conditions for a qualifying referral live in the partner agreement you accept when you join, and that agreement governs the money side of the relationship. What these terms add is simple: referral links must not be promoted through spam, cookie stuffing, paid search on our brand name, misleading claims about what we deliver, or any site that would embarrass a reasonable client. Breaking that ends the arrangement and cancels unpaid commission.

13. Job applications

The form on the careers page is the only route in, and it is read by a person rather than a filter. Everyone hears back within five working days, including when the answer is that nothing is open. Applications are kept for twelve months so they can be read again when a seat opens, they are never shared with anyone outside the team, and they are deleted the same day you ask. Sending an application does not create an offer, an interview entitlement or a contract of any kind.

14. Quotes, proposals and client work

Prices, ranges and timelines shown on the website are indicative and are not a binding offer. They exist so you can budget honestly before a conversation, which is more than most development sites give you, but a number on a public page cannot account for your integrations, your deadline or your existing codebase.

An engagement starts only when a written scope and a fixed quote have been agreed by both sides. From that point the signed documents govern the work, the payment schedule and the delivery dates, and they take precedence over anything published here. Money is billed across milestones you approve as they land, and where you stand if a project stops early is set out in full on the refund policy page.

15. Links to other websites

Some pages link to external sites, documentation, repositories and app store listings we do not control. Those links are references, not endorsements, and we are not responsible for the content, pricing, security or availability of anything on the other side. Where a link is an affiliate link that could earn us a commission, the page says so at the point of the link rather than in a footnote nobody reads.

16. Availability and changes to the site

This is a working website, not a service you have bought, and no uptime is promised. Pages get rewritten, tools get added and retired, and URLs occasionally move. Redirects are put in place where a page had traffic worth keeping. Maintenance, hosting problems and the general weather of the internet mean the site will sometimes be unavailable, and nothing here entitles anyone to compensation for that.

17. No warranties

The website and everything on it are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non infringement. We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted or error free, that defects will be corrected, that the site is free of harmful components, or that the information published here is complete, current or correct at the moment you read it.

18. Limits on our liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss arising from your use of this website. That includes lost profit, lost revenue, lost or corrupted data, wasted expenditure and business interruption, whether or not the possibility of that loss was known in advance.

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, it is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in connection with the website in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred United States dollars. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited under the law governing these terms or under the consumer protection law of your own country.

19. Your responsibility to us

If your use of this website breaks these terms and that causes a third party claim against us, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it, including legal fees. In practice this clause is aimed at the small number of cases involving scraping, republication and abuse of the forms. Ordinary readers, subscribers, applicants and clients will never come near it.

20. Suspending access

Access can be blocked, throttled or withdrawn where traffic is abusive, automated beyond a sensible rate, or aimed at the security of the site. Where the block is a mistake — and shared office addresses do get caught occasionally — one message is usually enough to have it lifted the same day.

21. Privacy and cookies

What is collected, why, how long it is kept and what rights you have over it are covered in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms. It is worth reading for one detail alone: IP addresses are stored as one way hashes rather than as addresses, so the raw value never sits in the database.

22. Changes to these terms

These terms are revised as the services offered here change and as the law moves. Revisions take effect when they are published, and the "Last updated" date at the top of the page changes with them. Continuing to use the site after an update means you accept the revised version. For a signed project, the terms in force are the ones published on the day you signed, so a later change never applies backwards to work already agreed.

23. Governing law and where disputes go

These terms are governed by the law of the country in which App Developer is established, and any dispute arising from them falls to the exclusive jurisdiction of the competent courts of that country. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this clause does not remove the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in. Before anything reaches a court, please write to us: almost every disagreement that has ever arrived here was a misunderstanding that one honest email resolved.

24. The remaining formalities

If a court decides that any part of these terms cannot be enforced, that part is removed and the rest continues to apply. Not enforcing a clause on one occasion does not waive the right to enforce it later.

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the Refund Policy, are the whole agreement between us about your use of this website. We may transfer our rights and obligations under them if the business is sold or restructured, and doing so will never reduce the rights you have under this page.

25. How to reach us

Questions about these terms, permission requests and anything that looks wrong on this page can go to contact@expertappdeveloper.com or through the contact page. Messages are answered personally, usually within a working day.