Terms of engagement

How projects, retainers and repairs are scoped, priced and paid. Short, in plain English.

These are the terms of Pratheepan Emil Patrick, ABN 24 788 487 921 — Registered Professional Engineer, Victoria, reg. no. PE0011615; NER 4260598 — last updated [date]. They apply to every job and are governed by the law of Victoria. A signed scope document can override any of them for that job.

Projects and packages

• Scope in writing first. Every job starts with a written scope: deliverables, an acceptance-test list, exclusions, turnaround and price. Work starts when you’ve accepted it and the deposit has cleared.
• Payment. 50% deposit to start; the balance on delivery, payable within 14 days. The diagnostic week (and the assessments built on it) is the exception: paid in full before it starts. Retainers are monthly in advance. Prices are in Australian dollars; see the footer for the GST position.
• Changes. Anything outside the written scope is quoted before it’s done, in increments of AUD 2,500, and added to the scope in writing. Scope creep isn’t done for free and isn’t done silently.
• Diagnostic-week credit. The diagnostic-week fee is credited in full against any follow-on work over AUD 20,000 that starts within 90 days.
• Queue. What I’m currently booking is in the footer of every page and updated monthly. When the queue is long, package prices go up; turnaround and bench time don’t get squeezed.
• Ownership. You own the deliverables — source, schematics, layouts, reports — on final payment; the signed scope document carries the assignment. Third-party and open-source components (Zephyr, nRF Connect SDK, vendor SDKs, Linux) stay under their own licences. I keep ownership of my pre-existing libraries, templates and tooling and give you a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free licence to use them in the deliverable.
• Confidentiality. Your design stays yours. I don’t publish, show or reuse client-specific work. General lessons (“this regulator family does X under load dump”) may become a note on this site with nothing identifying you. If your company needs an NDA first, send it with the intake form.
• Your hardware. Units sent for a project or diagnostic come back by tracked post with the deliverable, return postage within Australia included. In transit they’re at the sender’s risk each way.
• Support after delivery. Bugs in what I delivered, measured against the agreed acceptance tests, are fixed at no charge for 30 days. Beyond that, see ongoing support.

Retainers

• Monthly, in advance, by direct debit under a direct debit request you sign at the start. Six-month minimum term; if you end it earlier, one month’s fee is payable in lieu. After six months, 30 days’ notice either way.
• Hours are capped per month and expire at month end. Overage at AUD 250/h, agreed before it’s used.
• Response: next business day, in writing (the 20-hour tier: same business day where I can, next business day guaranteed). One scheduled 30-minute call per month on the 5-hour tier, per fortnight on the 10- and 20-hour tiers. A four-hour SLA is a different product at a different price; ask.
• If I miss the response time in a month, that month’s fee is reduced by a quarter.
• If a debit fails and isn’t fixed within 14 days, work pauses until the account is current. The minimum term and the monthly fee keep running during a pause, and hours for a paused month are not carried over.
• What I deliver under a retainer is yours on payment of that month’s fee; third-party components stay under their own licences, as for projects.

Repairs

• Mail-in only. Pack it, post it, include the repair slip from the repairs page.
• Bench fee AUD 175, paid before I open the box; credited against the repair if you go ahead.
• Repair quoted after the bench diagnosis, typically AUD 300–650. If you decline, the unit is returned for the bench fee plus return postage.
• No fix: if I can’t repair it, you get a written finding and the unit back, and owe nothing more beyond return postage.
• Settings and parts. A repair may wipe the settings stored in the controller; include a saved settings file if one exists. Refurbished or salvaged parts may be used in a repair.
• Warranty: six months on the work I did, not on the rest of the unit. A unit that fails again from the same cause within six months is repaired again free; you pay postage to me, I pay postage back. This is on top of your rights under the Australian Consumer Law, which can’t be excluded; the full warranty wording, including the mandatory consumer-law text, is on the repair slip.
• Turnaround and capacity are in the footer of every page and updated monthly. If the queue is longer than four weeks, the price goes up before the hours do.
• Trade accounts for dealers are agreed in writing. They change how the bench fee is billed and your place in the queue, not the price or the warranty.
• Transit and uncollected units. Units are returned by tracked post at your cost. The unit is at your risk in transit both ways; say on the form if you want extra transit cover and I’ll add it at cost. If a unit can’t be returned — you’ve declined the repair and not paid the return postage, the return address bounces, or you don’t reply — I’ll write to the email and address on the form; if I’ve had no reply six months after that notice, the unit may be recycled or sold to cover costs, in line with Victorian uncollected-goods law. [Lawyer to confirm this wording before launch.]

Liability

Engineering advice and repairs are provided with due care and skill. For engineering work — services not ordinarily bought for personal or household use — my liability for a failure to meet a consumer guarantee is limited, at my option, to doing the work again or paying the cost of having it done again, and my total liability for a job is limited to the fee paid for that job; neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss. Nothing here limits rights that the Australian Consumer Law gives you that can’t be excluded, including the guarantees that apply to repairs sold to consumers.