Terms of service.

1. The agreement

These terms are between SearchPod Inc. ("SearchPod", "we", "us") and you, the person or business using searchpod.com or hiring us ("you", "the client"). Using the site means you accept the part of these terms that covers the site. Accepting a proposal, paying an invoice or giving us access to an account means you accept all of them.

Most engagements also have a proposal or service agreement that sets out scope, fees and targets. If that document and these terms say different things, the proposal or service agreement wins for that engagement. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information and forms part of these terms.

2. What we do

SearchPod is a Canadian marketing agency. We manage Google Ads and Meta advertising, do search engine optimization and AI search optimization, design and build websites and landing pages, set up analytics and tracking, and build custom software and dashboards for small and mid-sized businesses.

The exact services, deliverables and reporting for your engagement are the ones written in your proposal. Anything not written there is not included, and we are happy to quote it separately.

3. How engagements work

Month to month

Every engagement runs month to month. There is no minimum term, no setup fee and no deposit. Your first invoice arrives at the end of your first month, and each month after that.

The 30-day guarantee

If you are not satisfied with our work in the first 30 days of a new engagement, tell us in writing before the end of day 30 and you do not pay our management or service fee for that period. The guarantee covers our fees only. It does not cover money you paid to Google, Meta or another platform for advertising, costs we paid on your behalf with your approval, or custom development work you have already reviewed and approved.

Performance plans

Some engagements are priced on results, against targets we set together in the proposal. How the result is counted, when the fee steps up and what happens if a tracking tool fails are all written in that proposal so there is one agreed source of truth.

4. Fees and payment

• Fees are billed monthly, in arrears, in the currency shown on your proposal. Canadian sales taxes are added where they apply.
• Invoices are due by the date shown on the invoice. If an invoice is more than 14 days overdue we may pause work after telling you, and we may charge interest at 1.5% per month on the overdue amount.
• Work outside the agreed scope is quoted first and billed only when you approve it.
• We may change our standard prices with at least 30 days' written notice. A change never applies to a month you have already paid for.
• Fees already paid are not refundable except under the 30-day guarantee or where these terms say otherwise.

5. Ad spend and ad accounts

Advertising budgets are paid by you, directly to Google, Meta or the platform concerned, from a payment method on your own account. We never hold your ad money, add a percentage to it or take a commission from a platform on it. Our fee is the only thing you pay us.

Ad accounts, Business Profiles, analytics properties and tag containers are created in your name or moved into it, and we work inside them through a manager or partner link that you can remove at any time. The table below lists what stays yours.

You authorize us to access those accounts through the platforms' APIs, including Google APIs through our internal tool SearchPod Ads Manager, to do the work in your engagement. We use that access only for your engagement, as described in our privacy policy, and it ends when you remove our link or the engagement ends.

Advertising platforms set their own rules. You agree to follow them, and we set up campaigns to follow them. Platforms sometimes disapprove ads, suspend accounts, change pricing or change features without warning. We will work to fix or appeal anything we can, but we are not responsible for a platform's decisions or outages, and our fee for that month is still payable unless the 30-day guarantee applies.

6. What we need from you

Good work depends on a few things only you can provide. You agree to:

• Give us the access we need (website, ad accounts, analytics, Business Profile, domain registrar) within a reasonable time, and keep it working.
• Give us accurate information about your business, prices, service area and offers, and tell us when they change.
• Review and approve ads, pages and content promptly. If we do not hear back within five business days on something we have asked you to approve, we may treat it as approved so your campaigns are not held up.
• Make sure you have the right to use the logos, photos, text, testimonials and other material you give us, and that your business, products and claims comply with the law and with platform rules.
• Pay your invoices and your advertising platforms on time.
• Tell us about any legal, licensing or industry restriction on how your services may be advertised.

7. Websites, hosting and software

Websites and landing pages

Websites we build for you run on your domain. While you are a client we host them, keep them updated and handle the technical side. When the engagement ends you may keep the site: we hand over the files and content, and we give you up to 30 days of transition hosting so there is no downtime while you move it, or we can quote ongoing hosting.

Third-party components

Stock photos, fonts, plugins, widgets and similar components come with their own licences. Some of those licences are tied to our accounts and may need to be re-licensed by you if you take the site elsewhere. We tell you which ones those are at handover.

Custom software and dashboards

Custom software we build to your specification and that you have paid for is yours, except for the frameworks, tooling, templates and components we reuse across clients. For those you receive a permanent, non-exclusive licence to keep using them as part of your project. Software we provide as a service, such as our client dashboard, is licensed to you for as long as you are a client.

8. Who owns what

• Your material stays yours. You give us a licence to use it to do the work.
• Deliverables such as ad copy, pages, designs, content and reports become yours once the invoice that covers them is paid.
• Our know-how, methods, processes, templates, internal tools, negative keyword libraries and anything we created before or outside your engagement stay ours.
• Portfolio. We may name you as a client and show the work we did for you in our portfolio, case studies and proposals. If you prefer not to be named, tell us and we will not.

9. Confidentiality

Each of us keeps the other's non-public information confidential: pricing, margins, customer lists, strategies, account data and anything marked or obviously confidential. We use it only for the engagement and share it only with team members and providers who need it to do the work and are bound by similar obligations. This continues after the engagement ends. It does not apply to information that is already public, that we each already knew, or that the law requires us to disclose.

10. Results and guarantees

We do our work carefully and to a professional standard, and we report results to you honestly. Marketing results depend on things outside anyone's control: search engine and platform algorithms, auction competition, your market, your prices and how quickly leads are followed up. So we do not promise a specific ranking, number of leads, cost per lead, traffic level or sales figure, and nothing on this site or in a proposal is a promise of one unless it says so in writing in the proposal.

The 30-day guarantee in section 3 is the one guarantee we make on every engagement.

11. Cancelling and ending

Either of us can end an engagement for any reason with 30 days' written notice. Email is fine. You pay for work done up to the end of the notice period and nothing after it. There is no exit fee.

When an engagement ends, within the notice period we:

• Leave your ad accounts, Business Profile, analytics and tag containers in your hands and remove our own access when you ask.
• Give you an export of your leads, bookings and reports, and the files and content for anything we built.
• Hand over passwords and credentials for anything we set up for you.

We may end an engagement sooner if an invoice is more than 30 days overdue after a reminder, if you ask us to do something unlawful or against a platform's rules, or if working together has become impossible. You may end sooner if we materially fail to do what we agreed and do not fix it within 14 days of you telling us.

12. Liability

To the extent the law allows, our total liability to you for anything arising from an engagement or from this website is limited to the fees you paid us in the three months before the claim. We are not liable for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data or other indirect losses, or for the acts, outages or decisions of third parties such as Google, Meta, hosting providers or payment processors.

You are responsible for claims that arise from material you gave us, from your products and services, or from instructions you gave us that we followed, and you agree to cover us for those claims. Nothing in these terms limits liability for fraud, wilful misconduct or anything that cannot be limited by law.

13. Using this website

• The text, designs, graphics and code on searchpod.com belong to SearchPod Inc. or our licensors. You may read and share it; you may not copy it to build a competing site or product, or scrape it in bulk.
• Our pricing calculator, audit tools, grader and similar tools give estimates for information only. They are not a quote and not advice for your specific situation. Your proposal is the quote.
• The demo websites and sample businesses shown in our industry pages and proposals are fictional unless we say otherwise. Any resemblance to a real business is coincidental.
• We link to other sites and services. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content or terms.
• Do not use the site or our forms to send spam, attempt to gain unauthorized access, interfere with the service or break any law.

14. Referral program

You can refer a business to us through our referral page. If the business you refer becomes a paying client, you earn a referral reward of up to $1,500, depending on the engagement, paid monthly. There is no cap on how many businesses you can refer, and a referral stays credited to you no matter how long the business takes to sign.

A referral counts when you are the first person to introduce the business to us and the business was not already talking with us. You cannot refer your own business or one you own. We may change or end the program at any time, but a reward already earned is always paid.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there. The courts of Ontario have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, although we would much rather talk first: tell us about a problem and we will try to sort it out within 30 days before anyone involves a court. If a part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still applies.

16. Changes to these terms

We update these terms when our services or the law change, and we update the effective date at the top. For a change that matters to current clients, such as a change to fees, notice periods or the guarantee, we email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and it applies from your next billing month. Continuing to use the site or our services after a change means you accept it.

17. Contact us

Questions about these terms, a proposal or an invoice all come to the same place: