Terms of service

Who you are dealing with

These terms are between you and Redstick Trading Limited, a company registered in Ireland under number 803586, registered office 57 Clontarf Road, Clontarf West, Dublin, D03 A7P0, Ireland. We call ourselves we and us. We call you you.

You can reach us at hello@themodernhousebuilder.co.uk.

We run the service and the service is ours. When you pay for something, your payment is handled by Paddle, who act as the merchant of record. That means Paddle is the seller for the transaction itself and their buyer terms apply to the payment. Everything else on this page is between you and us.

What the subscription is

Forty pounds a month, including VAT. It gives you the online book kept up to date, and the tools: a budget, a programme, enquiries and orders, quote levelling, safety paperwork, a site diary, and the record everything writes into.

One live build at a time. A build is live until you record its completion date. When you do, that build is finished, it stops counting against you, and you can start another. You can keep as many plots on your shortlist as you like. Only the one you are building counts.

The seven day trial

You get seven days free, and we take your card details when you sign up.

During the trial you can use everything and download nothing. Every document is there on your screen. Taking it away is what the subscription buys, and when you press download during the trial we tell you so.

The features that read your documents and draft text stay available during the trial, on the same allowance as a paid subscription.

Before we take your first payment we will email you to say so. If the trial rolls into a paid subscription, you have fourteen days to cancel and get a proportionate refund.

Paying, and stopping paying

Cancel whenever you like, online, in your account. It is no harder than signing up was.

When you cancel, you keep access to your data for six months. Not the app, the data.

You can take away the completion pack and your own files, whatever stage the build had reached. You do not have to finish the house to be allowed your own record. Those two leaving artefacts are earned by at least one paid month, so a trial that lapses without becoming a paid subscription does not earn them.

After the six months runs out we delete what we hold within thirty days.

Your build record is yours

What is in the record is what you put there. We hold your evidence. We do not interpret it and we do not tell you what it means.

Your own files come back exactly as you uploaded them, byte for byte, alongside the documents we generate.

The record holds things about other people too: a named engineer's phone number, the person who signed an induction, your own written opinion of a business you dealt with. That is part of your record, it is exported with everything else, and it is deleted when your record is. There is no separate clock for it.

The features that read and draft

Some tools read documents you upload and draft text for you. You own what goes out under your name. Anything we draft is shown to you separately from anything you wrote, and a document will not produce until you have settled every drafted part of it. We will not print words in your name that you have not accepted.

We record which model produced a draft and on what date, so that question stays answerable later.

These features cost us money each time they run, so there is an allowance. It is generous, it rolls forward month to month so that a heavy month draws on the quiet ones, and it is set high enough that ordinary use does not meet it. The allowance and how it works are on the fair usage page. We may change it, and if we lower it we will give you thirty days' notice before the change takes effect.

What we do not do

These are design decisions, not disclaimers. The product refuses to do them and always has.

• We do not write your risk assessments or method statements. Safety documents create legal duties that are yours, and it would not be reasonable for us to write them for you. We help you hold and check them.
• We do not judge whether a safety document somebody has given you is true for your site.
• We do not price your work. We do not generate rates. Where we cite published guidance it is named, dated, and calculates nothing.
• We do not tell you what your evidence means. We hold it and we show it to you.

We are not your architect, engineer, surveyor, solicitor or building control officer, and nothing in the product is professional advice.

What we are responsible for

We are responsible for running the service with reasonable care and skill, and for the things the law does not let us exclude, including liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence and for fraud. Nothing on this page limits your rights as a consumer under UK law.

We are not responsible for decisions you take about your building work, for the cost or consequences of those decisions, or for loss of profit, loss of business or any loss that was not a foreseeable result of us getting something wrong. Where we are liable, what you can recover is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the problem arose.

The book

Buying the book gets you that copy, as it was published. The subscription carries the same chapters kept up to date as rules, prices and products change. They are the same words in two different states, not the same thing sold twice.

Paperback £29.99, ebook £9.99, PDF direct from us £9.99. Books are zero rated for UK VAT, so those are the prices you pay.

If you buy the PDF direct, it goes through the same checkout as the subscription and creates no account. We email the file to the address you used to pay. Keep a copy somewhere safe, because buying the PDF creates no account and that email is the only copy you have.

The PDF is licensed to you personally, for your own use. You may print it and keep it for as long as you like. You may not republish it, share it publicly, upload it anywhere others can download it, resell it, or reproduce it for anyone else.

The free plot check

Free, no account, and capped at a handful of reads a day from one connection, because each read costs us money.

We aim a third party's historic map viewer at your plot and read what you send back. We host and licence no maps ourselves.

We never keep the screenshot. It is read and discarded in the same request, and it is never stored. If you decline the result we delete what you gave us immediately. If you do nothing we delete it after seven days.

The demonstration

The demonstration is our own build and our own data. You can download most of what it produces, because it describes a house that is not yours. Two things you cannot take: the enquiry pack and the package schedules. Those are our work and they are the same document whoever is reading them.

Changing these terms

If we change anything that affects what you are paying for or what you get, we will tell you at least thirty days before it takes effect. If you do not want to accept the change, you can cancel.

Law

These terms are governed by Irish law, and the Irish courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer in the United Kingdom, you keep the protection of UK consumer law and you can bring proceedings in the UK courts. Nothing here takes that away.