Terms of Service

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are an agreement between you and Paragon Media Canada (“Paragon”, “we”, “us”), a web design and digital marketing business operating from the Niagara Region of Ontario, Canada.

They cover:

• This website — paragonmediacanada.ca, including the pricing builder, the contact and booking forms, and anything else published here.
• Our services — website builds, hosting and website care, Google Business Profile management, Local SEO, social media management, email marketing, ads management, photo and video work, and the one-time add-ons in our catalog, whether bought individually or as a bundle.
• The client portal — the logged-in area where clients, their team members, prospects and outreach specialists see projects, files, leads, invoices and change requests.
• The lead-capture endpoints we operate on our clients’ own websites, described in section 13.

Our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy form part of these Terms. By using this website or our services you accept all three. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site or the services.

2. Definitions

• Client — a business that has engaged us for one or more services.
• Service Agreement — the written proposal, quote, invoice or agreement that sets out the specific services, prices, scope, term and notice period for a particular Client. Where a Service Agreement and these Terms disagree, the Service Agreement governs for that Client.
• Portal — the logged-in client area of this website (and the installable app version of it).
• Visitor Data — personal information submitted by a member of the public through a form on a Client’s own website that we operate or process on that Client’s behalf.

3. Use of this website

You may view and use this website for the purpose of learning about, buying and managing our services. You may not:

• Copy, republish or mirror the site or its content for commercial purposes
• Attempt to decompile, reverse engineer or probe the site or its APIs
• Remove copyright or other proprietary notices
• Use automated tools to scrape, overload or interfere with the site, the portal or the lead-capture endpoints
• Use the site in a way that breaks any applicable law

Pricing shown on this website is our current published catalog and may change. The prices that apply to you are the ones in your Service Agreement.

4. Services, packages and quotes

Our services can be bought individually or as a bundle. A bundle is priced lower than the same services bought separately; where a bundle shows a saving, that saving is calculated against our published individual prices.

A price you assemble on this website, receive by email, or see in a proposal is an estimate based on the information available at that time. It becomes binding when both sides accept a Service Agreement. Some services need us to look at your existing website before we can quote accurately — we will say so rather than hold you to a number we could not have known.

Some services are only available in the Niagara region because they require someone physically present — photography, video and on-site content shoots. Everything else is delivered remotely and is available anywhere we agree to serve.

5. Setup fees — what they buy

Most recurring services carry a one-time setup fee, charged before or at the start of the engagement. A setup fee pays for the work of getting the service built and running: the initial build, audit, configuration, account access, research, onboarding and the first version of whatever the service produces. It is work performed, not a deposit against future months.

A setup fee may be reduced or waived when a service is bought alongside another one — for example, website care bought together with a website build. Any such adjustment is shown in your Service Agreement.

Refunds of setup fees are governed by your Service Agreement. If your Service Agreement is silent, contact us and we will deal with it in good faith, taking into account the work already completed.

6. Recurring retainers and billing

Billing cycle

Monthly services are billed monthly in advance. Your billing date is set when the service starts and recurs on the same day each month. Each month’s payment covers that month’s work; the work described for a service is what we deliver within that month, and unused work in a month does not roll over unless your Service Agreement says so.

Payment methods

We accept payment through the methods stated on your invoice. Card payments are processed by Stripe; we do not receive or store your full card number. Ad budgets for paid advertising services are paid by you directly to the advertising platform on your own account and card — they never run through Paragon, and our management fee is separate from your ad spend.

Annual prepayment

You may prepay twelve months of a monthly service and receive 20% off the monthly fee. Setup fees, one-time add-ons and third-party costs such as ad spend are not discounted. An annual prepayment covers a fixed twelve-month term; refunds of the unused portion if you cancel mid-term are governed by your Service Agreement.

Late or failed payments

If a payment fails or an invoice goes unpaid, we will contact you. If it stays unpaid, we may pause the affected services — including publishing, posting, ad management and, after further notice, hosting. We will give you reasonable notice before anything goes offline, and we will not delete your website or your data as a first response to a missed payment.

Price changes

We may change the price of a recurring service on reasonable advance written notice. A price change never applies retroactively, and it never applies inside a term you have already prepaid. If you do not accept a price change, you may cancel the affected service as described in section 7.

Taxes

Prices are in Canadian dollars and are exclusive of applicable taxes, which are added where required by law.

7. Cancellation, and what happens when you leave

How to cancel

You may cancel a recurring service by giving us written notice — email to the address in section 22 is enough. The notice period, and any minimum term, are set out in your Service Agreement. We may also end a service on written notice, and we will give you a reasonable handover period when we do.

The final billing period

Cancellation takes effect at the end of the notice period. You are billed for the months up to and including that point; we do not bill you for months after it. Work already performed and one-time fees already earned are not refunded because you later cancel.

Your website

The finished website we built for you is yours (see section 9). When you leave:

• Your domain stays yours. If we registered or manage it on your behalf, we will transfer it to you or to a registrar you choose.
• Hosting stops. Hosting and SSL are part of a monthly service. When that service ends, we stop hosting your site and it will no longer be served from our infrastructure. It does not continue for free.
• You get a copy of your site. On request during the handover period we will provide an export of your website — its content, images and the code we built for you — in a form you or another provider can host elsewhere. We will help a new provider get it running, within reason.
• Accounts we manage for you go back to you. Your Google Business Profile, ads account, social accounts and email platform remain yours; we remove our management access.
• Your lead data. The leads captured from your website belong to you and can be exported from the portal before your access ends. See section 13.

How long we keep things after you leave is set out in the Privacy Policy. Please export anything you want to keep before your portal access ends.

Pausing instead of leaving

We can pause a recurring service by agreement. A pause stops the monthly work and the monthly fee for that service; it is not a cancellation and it does not restart automatically unless we agree a restart date.

8. Your responsibilities

• Materials and rights. You confirm that any content you give us — text, photos, logos, video, reviews, testimonials, customer lists — is yours to use, or that you have permission to use it, and that our using it as instructed will not infringe anyone’s rights.
• Accuracy. Claims we publish about your business (licences, certifications, guarantees, years in business, service areas) are your representations. We publish what you tell us.
• Timely input. Some work cannot proceed without your content, approvals or account access. Timelines shift when it is not provided, and a service that cannot proceed for lack of input is still billable.
• Access and credentials. Where you give us access to your accounts, you are responsible for granting it correctly and for revoking it when the engagement ends.
• Legal compliance on your own site. If we build or host your website, you remain the operator of that site and are responsible for its privacy notice, cookie disclosures, accessibility obligations and any consents your own customers must give — including under CASL and PIPEDA. We will help; we do not assume those obligations for you.

9. Intellectual property

What you own

• Your content and brand. Everything you supply — copy, photographs, logos, trade marks, product data, customer information — stays yours. Nothing here transfers it to us.
• The final deliverables, once paid for. On full payment of the applicable fees, you own the final website design, page layouts, written copy, graphics, photographs and video we produced specifically for you, and the site-specific code we wrote for your project. Ownership transfers on payment, not on delivery.
• Your data. The records in your portal account — your leads, files, intake answers, change requests and invoices — are yours.

What we keep

• Our reusable tools. Frameworks, component libraries, templates, internal software, the client portal and CRM, our processes, checklists and know-how remain ours, including anything we improve while working for you. Your website is built with these; you do not acquire them by buying a website.
• A licence to run your site. Where a deliverable necessarily contains our reusable components, you get a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use, host, modify and continue running them as part of that deliverable — including after you leave us. You may not extract them to resell or to build sites for others.
• Third-party materials. Fonts, stock imagery, plugins and other licensed components are supplied under their own licences, which pass to you on the same terms we hold them. Some are per-site or subscription-based; we will tell you when one is.
• Unpaid work. Until the applicable fees are paid, work we have produced remains ours and is licensed to you only for review.

Portfolio and credit

Unless you tell us in writing not to, we may show your finished website, brand work, photography and video, and describe the results, in our portfolio, case studies, social media and proposals. We may place a small, tasteful credit and link in the footer of sites we build; ask and we will remove it.

10. Results — what we do and do not promise

We promise to perform the work described in your Service Agreement with reasonable skill and care. We do not guarantee outcomes: search rankings, map pack position, traffic volume, number of leads, conversion rates, social reach or revenue. Those depend on competitors, market conditions and the policies of platforms we do not control.

SEO in particular is a compounding investment. Where we give a horizon — for example, that meaningful movement is typically seen from months three to six — that is an expectation based on experience, not a commitment.

We do not control Google, Meta, or any other platform. A platform may change its algorithm, suspend a listing or account, or change its rules at any time. We will help you respond; we are not liable for the change itself.

11. The client portal

Accounts and sign-in

Portal access is by email sign-in link or Google sign-in. There is no password to lose. Two-factor authentication is available and we recommend turning it on. You are responsible for keeping access to your email account secure, because whoever controls the email address controls the portal account.

More than one person per business

A client account can have several people on it. One person is the owner of the account; additional people can be added as managers (who can act on the account) or viewers (read-only). The account owner is responsible for who is added, for what those people do on the account, and for telling us when someone should be removed. Anyone with manager access can see the business’s leads, files, invoices and project information.

Administrator support access (“view as user”)

Please read this one. To provide support, a Paragon administrator can open the portal as your account and see exactly what you would see, without your password and without a prompt at the time. This is how we diagnose problems you report. While that is active, the administrator acts with your account’s permissions only — never elevated ones — and every action taken is recorded against the real administrator’s name in an audit log, along with the time and what was changed. Administrators cannot open another administrator’s account this way. You may ask us for a record of any such access to your account at any time. This is also described in the Privacy Policy.

Availability

We aim to keep the portal available at all times but do not promise uninterrupted service. The portal is a convenience for managing your engagement; it is not the service itself, and portal downtime does not on its own reduce a monthly fee.

Acceptable use

Do not upload malware, content you have no right to, or material that is unlawful. We may suspend an account that is being used to harm the platform or another user.

12. Notifications and messages we send you

Signing in, two-factor codes, invitations, booking confirmations and account notifications are transactional messages: they are part of the service and are sent for as long as you have an account. They do not carry an unsubscribe link, because unsubscribing from your own sign-in email would lock you out.

Marketing and follow-up messages are commercial messages under Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). Every one of them carries a working opt-out link, and using it stops that category of message. We do not send commercial follow-up sequences to people who have not engaged with us first.

If you turn on browser notifications, we may send push notifications about your account. You can turn them off in your browser or in the portal at any time.

13. Lead capture on your website

For many clients we operate a lead-capture endpoint that receives form submissions from the client’s own website and delivers them into the portal, by email and by internal notification.

Where we do this, the relationship is straightforward and worth stating plainly:

• You are responsible for the personal information your visitors submit. It is collected by your website, from your customers, for your purposes. You decide what is asked for and what it is used for.
• We handle it on your behalf — receiving, storing, notifying and displaying it to you. We do not sell it, do not use it to market our own services to your customers, and do not share it with anyone except the service providers listed in our Privacy Policy or where the law requires it.
• What is recorded with each submission: the fields your form asks for, the complete raw submission, the page the form was on, the referring page, any campaign tags in the URL, the visitor’s IP address and browser user-agent string, and any files the visitor attached.
• Your obligations. Your website must have its own privacy notice telling visitors what is collected and why, and must obtain any consent the law requires — including express consent before you use a submitted email address for marketing. We will not send commercial email to your leads on your behalf unless you confirm you have that consent.
• Requests from your visitors. If one of your visitors asks us to access or delete their information, we will refer them to you and act on your instruction, unless the law requires otherwise.
• Nothing is silently discarded. A submission that does not match the form we expect is stored and flagged rather than rejected, so a broken form does not quietly lose your customers’ enquiries.

Your endpoint is authenticated by a token that is embedded in your website. Keep it as you would any other key; tell us if you believe it has been misused and we will issue a new one.

14. Third-party services

Operating your services means using third-party providers. Depending on what you buy, these may include Google (Drive, Sheets, Calendar, sign-in, Business Profile, Places and advertising), Stripe for payments, Resend for email delivery, Discord for internal notifications, browser push services, our database and hosting providers, and artificial-intelligence providers used to prepare research and draft reports.

Each has its own terms and privacy practices. Our Privacy Policy explains what each one receives. We choose them carefully but we do not control them, and we are not responsible for an outage, a policy change or an act of a third-party provider — though we will work with you to deal with the consequences.

Where our website or emails link to a third-party site, we are not responsible for its content or its privacy practices.

15. Referral program

We operate a referral program. Its terms:

• Anyone may introduce a business or a prospective outreach specialist to us. Provide only contact details you are entitled to share, and only where the person is happy to hear from us. Do not represent yourself as Paragon.
• A referral reward or commission is payable only where a referral is accepted by us and results in a paid engagement or a hire, on the terms in the referral or commission agreement that applies to you.
• Commission for outreach specialists is calculated on the setup fee of a closed deal. Monthly retainers, add-ons and ad spend do not pay commission. Rates are those published in the specialist workspace at the time the deal is confirmed.
• Rewards are not payable for self-referrals, for existing clients or existing leads already in our pipeline, or for referrals obtained by spam or misrepresentation.
• We may change or end the program, or withhold a reward for abuse, on notice. Referrals already accepted and closed before a change are honoured on the old terms.

16. Giving-back program

We provide free website work to nonprofit and community-improvement organizations whose work benefits the Niagara region. Its limits are part of the offer, not fine print:

• What is included: the domain, a basic website design, hosting, and full client-portal access — the same portal our paying clients use.
• For how long: two years, free. At the end of the two years the arrangement is reviewed. It does not renew automatically, and continuing is not guaranteed. If we do not continue it, we will tell you before the two years are up and will move you either to a paid plan by agreement or to a handover on the terms in section 7.
• What is not included: SEO, social media management, content production, advertising, and any management beyond hosting. These are quoted separately and may be discounted case by case.
• Who qualifies is decided by us, case by case, based on the benefit to the Niagara region. Being a registered charity is neither required nor sufficient.
• Ownership works the same as for a paying client. Your content is yours, and the finished site is yours; our reusable tools remain ours (section 9). Because no fee is charged, the transfer of ownership in the deliverables takes effect on delivery.
• We may end the arrangement on reasonable notice if the organization ceases to operate, changes into something the program was not meant for, or uses the site for something unlawful.

17. Confidentiality

Each of us may learn non-public information about the other — your customer lists, pricing and plans; our processes, pricing structure and tooling. Each side will keep the other’s non-public information confidential and use it only to perform this agreement, except where disclosure is required by law. This survives the end of the engagement.

18. Disclaimer

This website and its materials are provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties and conditions not expressly stated in these Terms, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Material on this website may contain technical, typographical or photographic errors, and may be changed at any time without notice.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits any right you have under the Ontario Consumer Protection Act, 2002 or other consumer protection law that cannot lawfully be excluded.

19. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, neither party is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business or loss of data, even if advised that such damages were possible.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the services is limited to the fees you have paid us for the affected service, as set out in your Service Agreement.

These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud, for personal injury, or under non-excludable consumer protection legislation.

20. Indemnity

You will indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from: content or materials you supplied to us; claims about your business that you asked us to publish; your use of the personal information of your own customers, including lead data captured from your website; and your breach of these Terms or of applicable law.

21. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. The current version is always on this page with its “Last updated” date. For material changes affecting existing clients, we will give reasonable advance notice by email or through the portal. Continued use of the website or services after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms. A change to these Terms does not change the price or scope in your Service Agreement.

22. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, without regard to conflict of law rules.

Talk to us first. If something goes wrong, contact us at the address below and we will try to resolve it directly. Most problems are a misunderstanding about scope and are fixed in a phone call.

If a dispute cannot be resolved between us, the courts of Ontario have jurisdiction, and both parties submit to that jurisdiction. Nothing here prevents either party from using Ontario’s Small Claims Court, or you from making a complaint to a regulator such as the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

23. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms together with your Service Agreement, the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy are the whole agreement between us on their subject matter.
• Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a term once does not waive it.
• Assignment. You may not assign this agreement without our written consent. We may assign it as part of a sale or reorganization of the business.
• Independent contractor. We act as an independent contractor. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture or employment relationship.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a delay caused by events beyond its reasonable control.
• Survival. Sections 9, 17, 18, 19, 20 and 22 survive the end of the engagement.

24. Contact

Questions about these Terms, or about anything in them you would like clarified before you sign:

Paragon Media Canada

Email: dax@paragonmediacanada.ca · Phone: +1 (905) 341-8775 · Serving the Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada