Terms & Conditions

These Terms apply to freelance services supplied by Kunj Shah and to your use of this website. They form the default agreement for any engagement that does not have its own written contract.

Browsing this site, reading it, or downloading the résumé accepts nothing — you are agreeing to the Terms only when you commission work. Where a signed statement of work, master services agreement, or non-disclosure agreement exists, that document wins on anything it addresses, and these Terms fill the gaps. Where they are all silent, the order of precedence is: the signed engagement document, then these Terms, then the published rate card on this site.

Nothing here is a consumer contract. If you are hiring me as a consumer rather than for business use, tell me before we start, because consumer protection rules in your country may override what is written below.

You are contracting with Kunj Shah, an independent software engineer trading as an individual in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. I am not an agency, I do not subcontract your work without telling you, and no third party is a party to this agreement.

The relationship is that of an independent contractor and a client. I am not your employee, partner, agent, or fiduciary, and I owe you professional services — not a general duty of loyalty to your business.

In practice that means I work for more than one client at a time unless we agree a retainer that reserves capacity, I use my own equipment and accounts, I carry my own insurance where a project warrants it, and I have no authority to sign, bind or speak for your company. Unless we agree otherwise in writing, I am not exclusive to you.

I build production AI systems: autonomous agents and multi-agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, computer vision on edge hardware, and full-stack AI applications. The specific services, stack, and deliverables are set out in the proposal or statement of work for each project.

Most work runs on one of four models. The proposal says which one applies, and everything below is a default that a statement of work can override.

Fixed scope

A defined set of deliverables for a defined price, split across milestones. This is the default for builds, and it is the only model where a fixed price is meaningful — the scope has to be genuinely fixed for the number to mean anything.

Hourly

For reviews, debugging, integration, pair sessions and mentoring — work where the shape is genuinely not knowable in advance. Hours are tracked against a written estimate and capped up front; I stop and raise a change request at the cap rather than billing past it. Time is invoiced weekly in arrears on a 7-day payment window.

Retainer

Reserved capacity for an agreed monthly fee, typically 10 to 25 hours a month with a shared channel and priority turnaround. Unused hours do not roll over and are not refundable, because the capacity is held whether or not you draw on it. Either of us can end a retainer with 30 days' written notice.

Full-time

Available on request for AI engineer, ML engineer or agent builder roles, remote or relocating. That is an employment or long-term contract conversation rather than a freelance engagement, so a separate agreement is drafted for it and these Terms apply only to the parts that still hold.

1. 01A proposal is valid for 14 days from issue, after which the pricing and availability may be re-quoted.
2. 02Estimates are estimates. Where the cost of a requirement is unknown until it is attempted, the proposal says so and the assumption is written down.
3. 03The statement of work defines deliverables, acceptance criteria, exclusions, timeline, and price. Anything not in it is out of scope.
4. 04Work outside the agreed scope becomes a written change request with its own cost and timeline, approved before I start it. I do not absorb unlimited scope creep and I do not silently do unpaid work.

• A project starts on a signed proposal or statement of work, with the agreed first payment in. Work begins when that payment clears, not when the paperwork is signed.
• Work is delivered in milestones. Each milestone is reviewed and accepted before the next begins.
• Each milestone is released on payment for the previous one. If a milestone stalls for more than 14 days through no fault of mine, I may pause the project and invoice for work completed to date.
• Work in progress is shared continuously in a repository or workspace you own or can access, so you can see progress rather than receive it at the end.

Most project delays are caused by waiting on the client, not on the engineering. These are the things that move the schedule:

• Timely feedback and approvals — agreed review windows, and a named person who can give a yes or a no.
• Materials, data, credentials, and API access needed to do the work, supplied complete and lawful to use.
• A warranty that you have the right to give me everything you provide: that the data, content, code and trademarks are yours or properly licensed, and that nothing in them obliges me to infringe someone else's rights. I rely on this and cannot verify your lawful basis from my side of the work.
• A single point of contact for decisions, so requirements do not contradict each other halfway through a build.
• Legal review of anything that must comply with a regulation. I implement requirements; I am not your counsel, and I do not warrant a regulatory outcome.

Where a delay is caused by something in this list, the timeline moves by the length of that delay. I will say so rather than absorb it and quietly ship late.

Each proposal includes a revision allowance against its acceptance criteria — two rounds is the standard on fixed-scope work, and the proposal states the number. A revision is a change to something that was agreed, not a change of direction. Two rounds of feedback on the same feature is one round with a lot of notes.

• Feedback consolidated into one list per round. Fragmented feedback across calls and messages gets treated as a new round.
• Work is deemed accepted 10 business days after delivery if no written rejection is sent, unless the statement of work says otherwise.
• A rejection must say which acceptance criterion failed. If it does not map to one, it is a change request.
• Revisions beyond the agreed rounds, or revisions to work already accepted, are billed at the project's standard rate.

• Fees are stated in the proposal, in Indian Rupees or US Dollars, and exclude applicable taxes. The published rate card and these Terms should never contradict each other; where they appear to, the proposal governs that engagement.
• Indian GST is charged at the prevailing rate where required. You are responsible for taxes in your own jurisdiction, including withholding tax where it applies.
• On fixed-scope work the split is 40% on signature and 60% on final delivery, unless the proposal states a different split. On hourly and retainer work there is no advance — you are invoiced weekly or monthly in arrears and pay within 7 days.
• Invoices unpaid after 7 days on hourly and retainer work, or 14 days on fixed-scope work, accrue interest at 1.5% per month, or the maximum rate your law permits, whichever is lower. Work pauses until the account is settled.
• Payment is by bank transfer, UPI, or an agreed cross-border service such as Wise. A cross-border payment is received net: bank charges and intermediary fees are yours, so the amount that lands is the amount invoiced.
• Where your law requires you to withhold tax from my fee, the invoice is grossed up so the agreed amount still reaches me, and you provide the withholding documentation I need to claim it back.
• A currency change between proposal and invoice is passed through at the rate on the invoice date.

The point of the exercise is that you end up owning what you paid for. So: on receipt of payment in full, all right, title, and interest in the custom deliverables created specifically for you transfer to you.

What stays with me

• Background and pre-existing material: tools, libraries, internal utilities, code fragments, and generic know-how I had before the project or developed independently of it.
• Anything listed in the proposal as retained, and any general reusable component not specific to your business — which stays mine and is licensed to you, perpetually and royalty-free, for use in the delivered work.
• Third-party and open-source components, which are governed by their own licences and remain subject to them.

You may not resell, license, or redistribute retained material on its own. It is licensed into your product, not extracted from it.

Third-party model output

Where a deliverable is generated using an external model provider, that output is also subject to the provider's terms. I do not claim to be able to license it exclusively, and I disclose in the proposal when a deliverable depends on a provider I do not control.

Confidentiality is mutual. I treat your business, data, credentials, and product plans as confidential, and I expect the same in return about my pricing, methods, and internal tooling.

• These obligations survive the end of the project, without a time limit.
• They do not apply to information that is public, already yours without restriction, independently developed, or lawfully required to be disclosed by law or court order.
• I disclose information only to the minimum number of people who need it to do the work, and only under equivalent obligations.
• A mutual non-disclosure agreement can be signed before the first conversation about your business, if you would prefer that on paper.

I build AI systems, and I use AI tooling to build them — code assistants, hosted APIs, local models, and my own agents. Rather than leave you to guess what that means commercially, here is exactly what it does and does not change.

• Your code, data, documents and credentials are never used to train or fine-tune any model, including one I run myself. Where a hosted provider is involved, the project is configured for no-training terms, and I tell you if a given vendor cannot offer that.
• Confidential material goes to a local or self-hosted model wherever the task allows it. If a task genuinely requires sending your material to a third-party model, that is agreed in writing first, with the provider named.
• Everything I deliver is reviewed and tested by me. Model output is a first draft, never an accepted deliverable, and no code reaches your repository that I have not run, read, and stood behind.
• You own the output the same way you own anything else I build for you, subject to the retained-material carve-outs above.
• Third-party providers set their own terms on what their output may be used for. Where a deliverable depends on one — generated assets, a fine-tuned model, a hosted endpoint — the proposal names it, and you accept those terms along with it.
• If your organisation has its own AI policy, a ban on public providers or a required approved-vendor list, tell me at kickoff rather than at review. Retrofitting a compliance requirement into a finished system is the expensive way to discover it.

Occasionally a project needs a specialist I am not — a designer, a security auditor, a data engineer. That is reasonable, but it happens on terms rather than by accident.

• You are told before any subcontractor touches your work, with their name and what they are doing. You may object on reasonable grounds — security clearance, jurisdiction, conflict of interest — and that objection stands.
• Nothing is subcontracted without your written consent where the work involves your production data, your credentials, or your customers' personal data.
• Subcontractors are bound by the same confidentiality, IP and data-protection obligations as me, and their work is my responsibility exactly as if I had done it.
• Subcontracting never changes your point of contact. You deal with me, not with a chain of names to chase when something slips.

Mutual, narrow, and limited to twelve months after an engagement ends. The purpose is to stop either side pulling the other's project team out mid-build. It is not a general non-compete, and it does not stop either of us working in the same market.

• For twelve months after an engagement ends, neither of us will knowingly solicit for employment the other's named project team members who worked on it.
• This does not apply to general advertising, to a recruiter approaching someone who had no role on your project, to someone who had already left your team, or to anyone approached without either party knowing they were on the project.
• Nothing here prevents either of us from taking work from a competitor, and nothing here prevents you from hiring whoever you like.

Unless we agree otherwise in writing, I may show finished work on this site and professional networks — the shape of the system, the stack, and non-confidential metrics — once it is publicly launched. This is how the site you are reading was built.

• Client data, credentials, private code, and internal business metrics are never published.
• Anything under a confidentiality agreement, or marked as sensitive at kickoff, is excluded.
• Say the word and your work is omitted entirely, no questions asked. Written withdrawal is honoured for anything not yet published.
• Attribution is welcome but never a condition of payment. You may ask me to remove a reference; I will, unless the work was jointly produced and your name is part of why it is worth showing.

I warrant that the work I deliver will perform according to the acceptance criteria in the statement of work, and that I will correct defects attributable to that work free of charge for 90 days from acceptance.

• That warranty covers defects in the delivered work: it does not cover new features, changed requirements, third-party service outages, model behaviour on new inputs, or your own modifications.
• Work is performed with reasonable skill and care, and with the professional standards of an experienced engineer. It is not a guarantee that a particular business outcome will follow.
• I do not warrant that third-party models, APIs, or platforms will remain available, accurate, or unchanged. That is a dependency, and I flag it in proposals rather than pretending otherwise.

A warranty and a support commitment are different things, so they are separate clauses. The warranty fixes defects in what was delivered. Support is what happens once that window has closed, and it is not assumed to be free.

• During the warranty window, defects in the delivered work are fixed free of charge, as set out under Warranties above.
• Beyond it, bug reports and small fixes are billed at the project's standard rate, or absorbed under a retainer if one is in place. Something that only broke because an upstream API changed its behaviour is a maintenance item, not a defect fix, and is not free.
• Ongoing support with a response commitment is a retainer line item, not a default: what hours, what turnaround, and what counts as urgent all get written down.
• I do not hold, monitor or administer production infrastructure after handover unless that was in scope. Handover includes the runbook, the environment inventory, and credentials transferred to you rather than retained by me.
• Advisory and knowledge-transfer sessions are sold as a fixed block of time. A day of handover is far cheaper than indefinite responsibility, and it leaves your team able to run the thing without me.

The liability cap matters more than the rest of this clause, so it is stated plainly: my total liability for anything arising out of a project is capped at the fees you paid me for that project in the three months before the claim.

• Neither of us is liable for indirect or consequential loss: lost profit, lost revenue, lost data, lost opportunity, or business interruption.
• Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law — fraud, wilful misconduct, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or your own confidentiality obligations.
• These limits apply equally to my subcontractors, employees, and agents.

You indemnify me against claims, damages, and reasonable legal costs arising from materials you supply — content, data, code, or trademarks — or from your use of the delivered work in a way that infringes someone else's rights or breaks the law.

I indemnify you the same way against third-party claims that the custom deliverables, as delivered and used as agreed, infringe intellectual property rights — excluding anything traceable to materials you supplied or to modifications you or a third party made.

• Either of us may terminate a fixed-scope engagement with 14 days' written notice. A retainer ends on 30 days' notice from either side.
• Cancelling fixed-scope work after it has started costs a kill fee of 25% of the remaining contracted value, or the value of commitments already made that cannot be unwound, whichever is greater. That is what reserved capacity costs when it can only be sold once.
• On termination, you pay for all completed work and work in progress up to that point, plus the kill fee where one applies. Any advance already paid is set against that invoice rather than refunded.
• You receive everything produced to date, in the repository or workspace, within 10 business days of final payment.
• I may suspend or terminate immediately for non-payment, for unlawful instructions, or where continuing would put a third party's data at risk.
• If you go quiet for 30 days on an hourly or retainer engagement, the engagement pauses rather than continuing to accrue fees. Resuming restarts the cycle.
• Provisions that by their nature should survive — payment, intellectual property, confidentiality, liability, and these terms generally — survive termination.

The Privacy Policy on this site describes how the site handles data. A project is different: it involves your business data, and the rules are in the engagement agreement rather than here.

• Your data is used only to deliver the project. It is never used to train or fine-tune any model, including mine, and never used for another client's benefit.
• Access is limited to people working on the project, under the same confidentiality obligations.
• Where the project requires a sub-processor — a cloud provider, an API vendor, a model host — I tell you which one and why, and they are bound to process data on your instructions.
• On termination, your data is deleted or handed back as agreed, within 30 days.
• A data processing agreement is available on request and is signed before any personal data is processed.

• Do not scrape, mirror, or bulk-copy the site to build a competing collection, and do not use it as a training corpus without asking.
• Do not attempt to disrupt the site, probe it for vulnerabilities without written permission, or bypass its rate limits and spam protections.
• Do not submit commercial spam, phishing content, or anything unlawful through the contact form.
• Do not misrepresent yourself or your affiliation when getting in touch. I will decline work I am not permitted to take.

Public information and the code on this site are provided for reading. Where a project carries an explicit licence, that licence applies; where it does not, all rights are reserved and the code is not yours to copy.

These Terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts at Ahmedabad, Gujarat have jurisdiction, under the Indian Limitation Act. Nothing in this clause removes any mandatory consumer protection you hold under the law of your own country.

Most disputes are a misunderstanding about scope or priority, and both of us would rather fix one than litigate it. The process below is in that order, and step three is the only one that involves a third party.

1. 01Talk to each other first. Raise it in writing within 14 days of noticing, and put the disagreement in a sentence or two — most of these dissolve once both sides can see the same problem.
2. 02If that fails, attempt good-faith mediation through a mutually agreed mediator, with costs shared equally. Nothing is filed before this step is genuinely tried.
3. 03If mediation does not resolve it, the matter goes to arbitration or to the courts at Ahmedabad, whichever the statement of work specifies. If neither says, the courts apply and the default above governs.
4. 04Either of us may seek urgent injunctive or protective relief from a court at any time without first going through these steps — to stop something irreversible happening to data, credentials, or IP while the argument continues.

The clauses that usually get skipped are here in plain terms, because a term nobody reads is a term that does not protect anyone.

• Notices are valid by email to the address the other side has given for the engagement, and take effect on delivery. A change of contact details is notified the same way.
• Neither of us may assign this agreement to a third party without written consent, though either may do so as part of a genuine sale or merger of the business, on written notice.
• These Terms, together with any signed statement of work, are the entire agreement between us on the subject. Earlier emails, calls, or messages do not form part of it, and nothing here displaces a duty that cannot lawfully be displaced.
• Neither of us may use these Terms or the engagement to imply endorsement, or to name the other as a reference, without written permission — with the one exception already given under Portfolio and credit.
• If you do not enforce a clause once, that is not a waiver of it. Waivers only count in writing.

I may update these Terms as the business changes. The effective date at the top always reflects the current wording, and changes apply to engagements that start after they are published. Terms agreed for work already in flight are not changed underneath you.

If a clause is found unenforceable, the rest of these Terms stand, and the unenforceable clause is narrowed to the smallest thing that works rather than struck out entirely.