Terms of use

1. What this specification binds

This document is the contract between VEXBE LTD as publisher and you as reader of the pages served at vexbe.co.uk. It reaches every page here and every file downloadable from here.

It stops at the edge of the website. Paid work runs on its own executed contract, described at section 9; no sentence published here becomes part of that contract, qualifies it, or varies anything inside it. Where the two documents appear to say different things, section 9 sets the order of precedence.

The document is written in the same specification register the rest of this site uses. Boundaries, grants, refusals and expiry conditions are named explicitly, because a term you cannot find is a term you cannot rely on.

2. The publishing party

"The company", "we", "us" and "our" mean VEXBE LTD, a private limited company incorporated in England and Wales under company number 17005285. "You" and "your" mean the person reading these pages, and where you read them for an employer, that employer too.

Officer particulars for the company are published by Companies House against company number 17005285 and are not duplicated here.

The company practises information technology consultancy and systems integration. It is not authorised in financial services, it does not practise law, and it does not provide accountancy services. It has no relationship of any kind with any other organisation trading under a similar name.

3. How the contract forms

Acceptance happens through use. Reading these pages binds you to this document; there is no button to press, no box to tick and no account to open, which is a deliberate choice rather than an omission.

Reading on behalf of an organisation carries a representation that you hold authority to bind it, and this document then binds that organisation alongside you.

The site addresses adults evaluating a business supplier. You should be 18 or over to use it, and nothing published here is aimed at a child.

If any part of what follows is unacceptable to you, the remedy is straightforward: close the page. Continued reading is the acceptance.

4. Interface class: publication, not offer

This site is a description of a practice. Its function is to let somebody considering the company work out what kind of problem it takes on, how it approaches one, and how a conversation starts.

In contract terms these pages amount to an invitation to treat. They cannot be accepted into a bargain. Nothing published here operates as a quotation, a proposal, a promise that capacity exists, a commitment to any figure, or a warranty as to outcome. Passages describing method, capability and commercial structure record customary practice, which is a materially different thing from an undertaking about the engagement in front of you.

Any figure, duration or structure appearing on these pages is indicative. A number becomes binding when it appears in a signed proposal, and not before.

5. The grant made to you

Permission to read these pages is granted on four qualities: it is personal to you, it passes to nobody else, it can be withdrawn, and it exists so that you may display, print and retain what is published while you work out whether to buy anything.

The permission holds while you observe this document and lapses the moment you stop observing it. Beyond reading and circulating the material inside your own organisation it carries nothing, and it shifts no ownership whatsoever.

Short quotation is allowed, and so is a link to any page here, subject to four conditions: quote accurately; do not pass the material off as your own; imply no endorsement or commercial tie that has no existence; and do not frame a page inside another site so that its origin becomes hard to see.

6. Operations refused at the boundary

The following are outside the grant in section 5 and are refused:

• reproducing, republishing, selling, renting, sub-licensing or otherwise commercialising any part of these pages;
• harvesting or systematically extracting what is published by automated means, or feeding it into the assembly or training of a corpus or a model, though ordinary indexing by a search engine falls outside this refusal;
• reaching for access nobody granted you, whether to these pages, to the infrastructure carrying them, or to anything joined to either;
• probing, scanning or otherwise stress-testing that infrastructure absent written permission secured beforehand;
• introducing anything malicious or technologically harmful, a virus, a worm and a logic bomb among them;
• aiming a denial of service attack, in whatever form, at these pages or at what serves them;
• reading or using the material in a way that breaks an applicable law or cuts across somebody else's rights;
• adopting a false identity, or a false affiliation, in correspondence with the company.

The Computer Misuse Act 1990 makes criminal offences of several operations on that list. Should this company conclude that one has been committed against it, the matter goes to the appropriate authority together with whatever assistance that authority asks for, the identity behind the traffic included where it can be established.

7. Rights in the published material

Intellectual property in this site belongs to the company or is used by it under licence. That covers the text, the structure and layout, the typographic arrangement, the source markup, the stylesheet and the marks appearing on the pages. Nothing outside the grant at section 5 is given up.

The typefaces setting these pages come under licence from whoever owns them, and no power to sub-licence them onward sits with this company.

Where a name, mark or logo belonging to another organisation appears anywhere here, it stays the property of that organisation and is used descriptively. Its appearance carries no suggestion of endorsement, partnership or affiliation.

Believing that something on these pages infringes a right of yours, write to the endpoint at section 21. Say what the material is, where it sits, which right is engaged and why you say it has been crossed. The complaint gets examined and answered.

8. The enquiry channel and what it does not create

Writing in opens a conversation and does nothing else. No contract forms, no retainer arises, and no obligation begins to run in either direction.

An enquiry may be declined, with or without a reason given. Capacity may be absent, the problem may sit outside the company's remit, or existing work may conflict with yours.

Treat a first message as unprotected. Until a confidentiality agreement is executed, material you send cannot be held as confidential, and you should not assume otherwise. Where you need protection before the problem can even be described, say so and an agreement is put in place before the description follows.

What happens to the message itself, and for how long, is specified as interface IF-02 in the privacy notice.

9. The separate contract for consultancy work

Paid work starts when both parties have signed a written contract, and on no earlier event. That contract, with any statement of work sitting beneath it, fixes scope, deliverables, timetable, fees and payment terms, the intellectual property position, confidentiality, the Article 28 clauses that apply when this company processes on instruction, and the liability position for that piece of work.

Precedence is simple. Questions about the work are answered by the executed contract. Questions about reading this website are answered by this document. Neither displaces the other, since their subject matter does not overlap.

Nothing said in a meeting, written in an email or agreed on a call binds either party as to scope, price or date unless it is captured in the signed agreement or in a written variation to it. That rule protects you as much as the company, since it means no commitment you were given can later be characterised as a misremembered conversation.

A purchase order on its own does not start chargeable work. Neither does verbal authorisation, however senior its source.

10. No advice, and no reliance

These pages are published for general information. They are not technical, legal, financial, regulatory or professional advice, and nothing here has been shaped around your circumstances.

Do not move on the strength of anything published here, and do not hold back on the strength of it either. A decision that needs advice should draw that advice from somebody who has been told your facts and who answers for the opinion they give you.

No representation is made and no warranty is given that what appears here is complete, current, or suited to a purpose of yours. Any of it may change at any moment, unannounced.

11. Availability, and the absence of a service level

Publication costs you nothing and the pages come as they are. Uptime is not promised. Freedom from error is not promised. No period is undertaken within which a defect gets corrected.

Any part of the site, or all of it, may be suspended, pulled or restricted for commercial or operational reasons, with reasonable warning where circumstances leave room for warning.

Obtaining your own access is a matter for you, and so is making sure that anybody who arrives here over your connection has seen this document and abides by it.

12. Edges leading off this site

A link pointing from these pages to somebody else's site is supplied for information alone. Those destinations lie outside this company's control, carry no endorsement from it, and it answers for neither what they publish, nor whether they are reachable, nor how they treat your data.

Crossing an outbound edge is done at your risk. Read whatever terms and privacy documentation waits at the far end before you rely on anything there.

13. Personal data

Every flow of personal data touching this company is specified in the privacy notice, which is incorporated into this document by reference. Storage written to or read from your device is specified in the cookie notice.

Where the company acts as processor on a client's instruction, the data protection terms sit in the signed agreement for that engagement, and this document has nothing to say about them.

14. Reading as a consumer

These pages are written for businesses. Should you be reading as a consumer, meaning for ends lying wholly or mainly beyond your own trade, business, craft or profession, every right the law confers on a consumer survives this document untouched.

Statutory rights are not disturbed here, those arising under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 included. Where a term below collides with a right you hold as a consumer, the right wins and the term yields as far as the collision runs.

A consumer may additionally sue in the courts of whichever part of the United Kingdom they live in, whatever section 20 says about forum.

15. The liability envelope

This section bounds what the company answers for. Read it before you rely on a word published here.

No part of this document excludes or restricts liability for: personal injury or death attributable to negligence by the company; fraud, or a fraudulent misrepresentation; anything at all that the law forbids excluding; and, where you deal with the company as a consumer, whatever the Consumer Rights Act 2015 puts beyond exclusion.

Subject to the paragraph immediately above, and because these pages are supplied without charge:

• conditions, warranties and other terms that statute, the common law or equity would otherwise read in are excluded;
• the company answers for no lost profit, lost revenue, lost business, lost anticipated saving, lost goodwill, corrupted or destroyed data, and no indirect or consequential loss at all, however it arises out of reading these pages, being unable to reach them, or acting on what they say;
• aggregate liability touching this website, however the claim is framed, in contract, in tort including negligence, for breach of a statutory duty or otherwise, stops at one hundred pounds sterling.

The ceiling in the previous paragraph attaches to the website and travels no further. Liability arising out of paid work is settled entirely inside the executed contract for that work; this section neither caps it nor colours how it should be read.

Nor does the company answer for loss or damage where malicious material reached your equipment because you came here or took a file away with you. Protection against that is yours to run.

16. Conditions outside reasonable control

Where these pages become unreachable, or slow to reach, for a cause lying beyond what this company can reasonably control, no breach of this document occurs. Causes of that kind include a fault at the hosting provider, a network or power failure, a measure imposed by a public authority, industrial action, and an attack aimed at infrastructure operated by somebody else.

17. Withdrawal of the grant

The permission at section 5 may be withdrawn immediately and without notice where you breach this document. On withdrawal you must stop using the site, and the company may take the matter further, including by reporting it to a law enforcement authority.

18. Revision of this specification

This document may be revised. The revision in force is whichever one appears on this page, and the issue date at the head records when it took effect.

Look at this page again when you next arrive. Reading on after a revision accepts the revised document. Nothing revised here reaches an executed consultancy contract, which changes only by the mechanism that contract itself provides.

19. General clauses

Entire agreement. This document, taken with the privacy notice and the cookie notice, exhausts what has been agreed between you and the company on the subject of reading this website, displacing anything said or written on that subject earlier.

Severability. A provision held invalid or unenforceable by a court is struck from this document, and the balance of it survives unaffected.

No waiver. Waiting before enforcing a right, or letting one occasion pass without enforcing it, surrenders nothing; the right remains available afterwards.

Assignment. What you hold and owe under this document cannot be handed to anybody else. The company may hand its own side to an acquirer of the business, and would record the fact on this page.

Third parties. Anybody who is a stranger to this document takes no right under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 to enforce a term of it.

20. Governing law and forum

English and Welsh law governs this document, everything it deals with, and the manner of its formation.

A dispute arising out of it, or connected with it, belongs exclusively to the courts of England and Wales, save for the consumer's entitlement at section 14 to sue at home.

21. Contact endpoint

One address serves every purpose: [email protected]. It is the only correspondence route the company operates, and messages to it are read by a person rather than sorted by a system.

For anything concerning personal data, use the same address with "Data protection" at the front of the subject line, and the handling contract at section 18 of the privacy notice applies to it.

For formal service of a document, the registered office recorded against company number 17005285 at Companies House is the address with statutory effect.