Every service. Every price. In writing.

It's the fair question to ask of anyone working on their own, and the honest answer is structural rather than reassuring. I document as I go and build with mainstream tools rather than anything peculiar to me, so the work can be handed to another competent developer without an archaeology project first. Planned time off I'll tell you about well in advance and we'll schedule around it. For anything genuinely urgent while I'm away, you'll have written notes good enough for someone else to act on, and where I'm hosting for you, that hosting can be moved out at any point. That's rather more than most agencies leave you with when your account manager changes.

By default, I do. I host what I build on infrastructure I run, under my billing, and the code sits in my repositories for the life of the engagement. That's what lets one person keep a site fast, patched and backed up, rather than chasing credentials across three suppliers every time something needs attention. The part that matters is that none of it is a lock-in: when our contract ends, the site and the code can be moved to you or to a supplier of your choosing, and I'll help with the move rather than make it awkward. If you'd sooner hold the hosting, the billing and the repositories yourself from the start, that's a perfectly normal arrangement and we'll settle it during discovery. Either way it's written into the scope before any paid work begins, along with what transfers to you and on what terms.

Then that's my problem, not yours. You get a written scope and a fixed quote before any paid work begins, and if I've misjudged the effort inside that scope I absorb it. The price only changes if you ask for something that isn't in the scope, and then I'll tell you what it costs before I do it, not afterwards on the invoice. The published prices on this page are genuine starting figures for straightforward versions of each job, which is exactly why the discovery call comes first.

Yes, and it's more common than you'd think. Quite a lot of my work involves coordinating with whoever already looks after part of the picture, a web agency, an IT provider, an in-house person, so a migration or a rebuild doesn't break something they own. I'm not interested in displacing people who are doing a decent job; if your current supplier is the right one for a piece of work, I'll say so.

That's rather the point. Most of my clients are SME owners, charity trustees and founders rather than technical people, and I write scopes, updates and handover notes in language you can take straight to your board, your team or your funders without translating them first. If I ever explain something in a way that doesn't land, tell me and I'll try again, that's on me, not you.

No, and it's worth being precise about what that means. Projects finish with handover notes written for a human being, built on mainstream tools rather than anything proprietary to me, so another developer can take the work on. Where I'm hosting for you, that moves to you or to your next supplier when the contract ends, and I'll help with the move. Ongoing support is a separate choice on top: retainers run month to month with one month's notice and hours that don't roll over, so staying with me has to be worth it every month rather than something you're contractually stuck with.

Yes to the NDA, before you share any detail, either yours or a standard one I can provide. On data more generally: much of my career has been spent on systems where formal background checks were a condition of the work, so handling confidential information carefully is habit rather than policy. I ask for the least access that lets me do the job, and I hand it back when the work is done.