You ownall of it
Source, infrastructure, accounts and deployment keys are yours from day one.
There is no licence you have to keep paying for, no proprietary framework you cannot leave, and no account in our name that holds your production system hostage. If you decided tomorrow to move the project to another engineer, you would already have everything needed to do it.
In practice
What this means
At a glance
What ownership means concretely
The source lives in your repository under your organisation, and it is there from the first commit rather than transferred at the end. Cloud, hosting, database, error tracking, analytics and App Store or Play Console accounts are registered to you and billed to your card. Deployment credentials, signing certificates and environment secrets are yours. The written deliverables — architecture notes, runbooks, deployment steps — are part of what you paid for, not an extra.
Why day one rather than handover
Ownership transferred at the end of a project is a promise. Ownership from the first commit is a fact you can verify at any point during it. It also means there is never a moment where a payment dispute, a scheduling problem or a disagreement gives anyone leverage over your production system. Nobody has to trust anyone.
When we host on your behalf
Some projects — VPN infrastructure in particular, and self-hosted pipelines — run on a VPS that we operate day to day. This is the honest edge of the claim, so it is worth being precise. Where you want the server in your own name, it is provisioned in your account on your card and we hold access as a collaborator. Where you would rather not run a Hetzner account, we host it and the SOW names it explicitly: what runs there, what it costs, and the migration path. In that case you still hold the configuration, the deployment scripts and a documented rebuild procedure, so the server is replaceable rather than irreplaceable. What we will not do is host something critical without you knowing that is the arrangement.
Third-party licences are a separate question
You own what we write. You do not own Stripe, Supabase, Anthropic, OpenAI or the App Store, and no supplier can give you those. Those are your accounts with your billing, and we tell you during scoping which ones a design implies and roughly what they cost to run, so the ongoing bill is not a surprise after launch. Where a paid library would create a dependency you cannot exit, we say so before choosing it.
Reused components
Some infrastructure — CI configuration, deployment scaffolding, internal utilities — is not written from scratch for each client, and paying us to rewrite it would be a waste of your money. Anything reused is either open source under a permissive licence or supplied to you under a perpetual, irrevocable licence with no fee attached. Nothing you receive stops working if you stop working with us.
Questions
Common questions
Who owns the intellectual property in the code?
You do. The SOW assigns it to you, and the source is in your repository from the first commit rather than transferred at the end of the project.
Can I take the project to another developer?
Yes, at any point and without asking us. You already hold the repository, the infrastructure accounts and the deployment documentation. We will answer a successor engineer's questions rather than obstruct the move.
Do I have to keep paying you a licence fee to keep using what you built?
No. There is no licence fee and no proprietary runtime. If you never speak to us again, everything we built keeps running.
What if Simnetiq hosts the server for my project?
Then the SOW says so explicitly, along with what runs there and what it costs. You still hold the configuration, deployment scripts and a documented rebuild procedure, so the server can be recreated elsewhere. Where you prefer, we provision it in your own account instead and hold access as a collaborator.
Do you reuse code between clients?
Some infrastructure scaffolding, yes — rewriting it per client would waste your budget. Anything reused is open source under a permissive licence or licensed to you perpetually and irrevocably at no cost. Your product code is yours alone.
What ongoing third-party costs should I expect?
Whatever your architecture implies: hosting, database, model APIs, payment processing, developer program fees. We name them during scoping with rough running costs so the bill after launch is not a surprise. They are billed to your accounts, not resold through us.
Contact Us
Still have a question?
Ask it before you commit to anything. Briefs and questions are answered within one working day, by the engineer who would do the work.