Code ownership & handoff

This page describes who owns what during a Solagon engagement, when ownership transfers, and what migration off Solagon-managed hosting actually looks like at the end of the minimum term.

The short version: while the retainer is active, Solagon hosts and manages the site, and ownership of the final deliverables transfers to you after the 12-month minimum term and full payment of all invoices. Below is the longer version, in the actual contract language.

What's yours from day one

These are yours from the moment they exist, regardless of where we are in the engagement:

• Your content — copy, images, branding, business data. We never claim ownership of content you provide or that we draft on your behalf.
• Your domain name — if you bring it, it stays in your registrar. If we help you buy it, it's registered in your name.
• Your business data — anything collected, stored, or processed on your site is yours. We don't aggregate, sell, or analyze client data across engagements.

If AI features in the build send data to a third-party model provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.), the relevant DPA is in place and called out explicitly in the SOW.

What transfers after the minimum term + full payment

Per the Master Services Agreement and your SOW, ownership of the final approved deliverables created specifically for you transfers to you upon (a) full payment of all invoices and (b) completion of the 12-month minimum service term.

That includes:

• The custom-built website code
• The design files and assets we produced for the build
• Documentation and runbooks created during the engagement

Until both of those conditions are met (full payment + minimum term), final ownership of the deliverables remains with Solagon. If you cancel before the minimum term ends, ownership stays with us until the early-termination fee in your SOW is paid in full.

What Solagon retains

Inside the deliverables we ship, some of the building blocks are Solagon's internal toolkit — patterns and code we've developed across many engagements. Per the MSA, Solagon retains ownership of:

• Proprietary tools
• Internal frameworks
• Code libraries
• Methodologies and templates
• Internal systems

You receive a perpetual license to use these as embedded within the deliverables — meaning you can keep running, modifying, and operating your site forever, even after a future migration. You just don't have the right to extract the underlying framework code and resell it as your own product.

This is standard for managed-development arrangements. It's not a "we own your site" trapdoor; it's the way agencies separate the unique work done for you (yours) from the reusable craft built up over years (ours, with you licensed to use).

Open-source and third-party code

A significant portion of every modern web build is open-source code with permissive licenses (Next.js, React, Postgres, Drizzle, Tailwind, etc., almost all MIT / Apache / BSD). Those keep their original licenses and you'd be using them whether you hired us or not.

Third-party services your site integrates with (Stripe, Resend, Vercel, etc.) have their own terms — we configure the integrations, but the relationship is between you and the vendor.

Hosting during the retainer

While the retainer is active, your site is hosted and managed by Solagon. That includes:

• Deployment and infrastructure management
• Server configuration and monitoring
• Performance and uptime oversight
• Platform updates as required

This isn't optional during the retainer — it's part of what the monthly fee buys, and it's what makes the model work. Active monthly payments are required to keep the site online.

Migration after the minimum term

Once the 12-month minimum is complete and all invoices are paid, you can request a hosting migration to your own accounts.

What that typically involves:

1. Code transfer — the final approved deliverables, in a Git repository handed to a GitHub user or org you control.
2. Vendor account setup — you create accounts on whatever services the site needs (hosting, database, email, analytics) and we transfer ownership or hand off configuration.
3. DNS coordination — you update DNS records to point at your new infrastructure; we coordinate the cutover so there's no downtime.
4. Runbook and architecture walkthrough — written or recorded, depending on what the inheriting team prefers.

Migration work isn't covered by the retainer fee — it's a separate scoped project, sized at the time. The complexity depends on the build, but most migrations off Solagon hosting take one to two weeks of coordinated work.

If you'd rather stay on Solagon-managed hosting after the minimum term, you can — the retainer simply continues month-to-month at the same fee, with 30 days' notice to cancel.

Bringing in another developer mid-engagement

There's no exclusivity clause in the contract. If you want a second developer or agency to audit the work, add a feature in parallel, or take over a specific surface, that's allowed — and we'll coordinate with whoever you bring in to keep things coherent.

We just need read access to whatever they ship into the codebase, and we ask that any changes go through the same review process the rest of the build uses. That keeps the system maintainable and keeps surprises off the production site.

Where to go next

Engagement model overview → Minimum term & cancellation → Decision-making →