You own everything
Accounts, code, domains, data and documentation are yours from the first day. Here is exactly how that works and what it means when we part ways.
The rule
Everything a project creates belongs to you and lives in your name. Not "transferred at the end". From the first hour.
In practice
- Hosting accounts (hosting, app stores, payment providers) are created in your company's name with your billing. We are invited as members and can be removed in one click.
- Domains and DNS are registered to you. We manage them while we work together.
- Repositories live under your GitHub organisation if you have one. If not, we create one for you and hand over ownership the same day.
- Secrets and keys are stored in your accounts' secret stores, never in chat, email or our laptops. We rotate them at handover anyway.
- Data stays in your databases and buckets. We take no copies beyond what debugging needs, and delete those when done.
- Documentation is in the repository, next to the code, where the next engineer will look.
When we hand over
Handover is a short checklist, not a ceremony:
- All credentials rotated; our access reduced to what ongoing support needs, or removed.
- README verified by actually following it on a clean machine.
- A recorded walkthrough, twenty to forty minutes, of how the system is built and how to change the common things.
- Open issues and ideas listed in the repository, honestly, including the things we would do differently.
If we disappear
The uncomfortable question, answered: if Kalevala.dev stopped existing tomorrow, your systems keep running, your accounts keep working, and any competent engineer can pick the code up from the README. That is the test we build to.
Licensing
Custom code is yours outright. Open-source components keep their own licences, listed in the repository. Where we reuse an internal library of ours, you get a perpetual licence to it as part of the project.