What You Should Own When an Agency Builds Your Store or Software

A common story among founders goes like this. The agency relationship ends, and the business finds that the domain is registered to the agency, the store's owner account belongs to a developer who has left, and nobody knows where the code is. Getting control back takes weeks, if it's possible at all.

This is avoidable. Settle ownership before the work starts, and check it again at handover.

Accounts that should be in your name from day one

• The domain and DNS
• The Shopify store, or the hosting account for custom software
• Google Analytics, Search Console and Merchant Center
• Meta Business Manager, the ad accounts and the pixel
• Payment gateway and shipping platform accounts
• Email sending, WhatsApp Business and any SMS provider
• The code repository, such as GitHub or GitLab

The agency should work through staff or collaborator access that you grant and can remove. If an agency asks to create any of these under its own name, ask why.

What the contract should say

Look for four things:

1. Who owns the work, and when. Ownership usually passes when the work is paid for. Check that it covers code, designs, content and documentation made for you.
2. The agency's own tools. Most agencies reuse libraries and components. You need a permanent licence to keep using them as part of your project.
3. Third-party software. Themes, apps, fonts and plugins belong to their makers. They should be licensed in your name and at your cost, so they don't vanish when the agency leaves.
4. Leaving early. What you pay, what you get back, and how quickly.

What our terms say

Our standard terms, which every proposal refers to, cover each of these:

• When you've paid all fees due, we assign you all copyright and other intellectual property in the deliverables: the designs, code, content and documentation made for you.
• Where our own libraries or components are part of the deliverables, you get a licence to use, copy and modify them as part of the project. It is non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide and royalty-free.
• Themes, apps and other third-party materials are provided in your name wherever possible, under their owners' licences.
• You keep your platform, hosting, domain, analytics, advertising and developer accounts in your own name, and change shared passwords at handover.
• You can cancel with 15 days' written notice. We keep the higher of the value of work done and 20% of the total fees, and refund the balance within 15 working days.
• For 30 days after launch, we fix defects in our own work at no charge.

The handover checklist

At the end of any build, ask for:

• Access review. A list of every account the agency touched, with their access removed or reduced to what any ongoing work needs.
• Code. The final code in your repository, with a short note on how to run and deploy it.
• Credentials. Every API key and secret the system uses, rotated after handover and stored where your team can find them.
• A guide for your team. How to do the routine jobs, such as adding products, editing banners and changing shipping rules, written or recorded for whoever does them day to day.
• Notes on anything custom. What each custom feature does, where its code lives, and what breaks if someone removes an app it depends on.
• Open issues. Known problems and unfinished items, in writing.

A clean handover means your team runs the routine work and you call the agency only for engineering. That's the arrangement we aim for.

If you're about to start a project, our discovery call covers ownership in the first conversation. If you're vetting agencies, start with an audit.