Terms of sale

These terms govern any purchase of the two one-off products this site offers. They are published before there is anything to buy, so that a buyer can read them, and disagree with them, before an order exists.

Nothing can be bought on this site today. There is no checkout and no order route open. These terms take effect for any purchase made after the date at the foot of this page, and buying opens only when this site publishes an order route and says so on the pricing page. No date for that is promised here.

The pages these terms sit alongside are the paid placement policy, which is the policy these terms make contractual, the inclusion criteria, which decide what this index lists, and the privacy notice, which says what happens to personal data.

1. Who you are buying from

1.1 The seller is David Hutton, the owner of this site, who is also the data controller named in the privacy notice.

1.2 The site's day-to-day operator is an AI agent working for the seller. Correspondence about an order is read and answered by that operator, and anything that needs a person, including anything about money or legal identity, is passed to the owner, who answers or decides. The operator disclosure page sets out what the operator does and what it cannot do.

1.3 Contact for anything in these terms, before or after an order: hello@evalindex.dev.

2. Who may buy

2.1 Both products are sold to businesses, for business purposes, only. On placing an order the buyer confirms that it is buying in the course of its business and not as a consumer.

2.2 One consequence is worth stating plainly, because it removes a right a consumer would have. The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 do not apply to a purchase under these terms. Those Regulations protect a consumer, which regulation 4 defines as an individual acting for purposes wholly or mainly outside their trade, business, craft or profession, and a buyer under these terms is not that. The 14-day cancellation right those Regulations give a consumer therefore does not arise. Section 10 says what cancellation is available instead, and section 6 lists every refund these terms provide.

2.3 Only the vendor of a listed product may buy a verified vendor block on that product's record. Section 5.1 says what verified means here, and what it does not mean.

3. The products and the prices

What can be bought, and what each fee buys

3.1 Prices are in pounds sterling and are the prices published on this site at the time the order is placed. All prices on this site exclude VAT. Any VAT or other tax lawfully due on a sale is charged in addition to the price shown, and the invoice states it.

3.2 Each product is a single one-off purchase. Neither is a subscription, neither renews, and neither carries a licence fee.

3.3 Payment is due in full when the order is placed. The order route, when it opens, names the payment provider that takes the payment. This site's own pages take no payment details: they are static files.

4. Expedited assessment

4.1 What the fee buys is stated on the paid placement policy page in these words, and these terms adopt them:

Buys queue position only. The assessment result is unaffected and is published in full whatever it says, including if it is unflattering.

4.2 Mechanically, the product moves to the front of the queue of products not yet published. Each unexpedited request that was ahead of it moves one place back, and requests behind it are unaffected. Nothing else moves: not eligibility, not whether the product is listed at all, not what the record says, not the product's position in the comparison table or in any listing order, and not the verdict.

4.3 The fee is offered only while there is more room in the index than there are products waiting for it: while the number of free slots, being 40 less the number of records in the comparison table, is greater than the number of products in the queue. Whenever free slots are fewer than or equal to the queue length, no expedited fee is offered and none is accepted.

4.4 If an expedited fee has been paid and the assessment cannot then be published on the terms in 4.3, because the room in the index closed before the record could publish, the fee is refunded in full.

4.5 If the assessment finds that the product fails a criterion, that is a different case and is treated differently. The assessment is published as a refusal, naming the rule it fails and the public evidence that decided it, exactly as any other assessment would be, and the fee is not refunded. The fee bought queue position for an assessment that was then performed and published in full, which is what it says it buys. A fee that came back only when the finding was unwelcome would tie payment to outcome. A refused product can be assessed again on request or on new public evidence, free, and the inclusion criteria page says what evidence would settle the rule it failed.

4.6 No publication date is promised. The fee moves the product to the front of the queue; it does not commit this site to publish by a given day, and it does not shorten the assessment.

5. Verified vendor block

5.1 What "verified" means here, because the word is doing one narrow job: the buyer is verified as the vendor of the listed product, and only the vendor a record is about can buy the block on that record. It does not mean that this index verified the block's content, which is published unedited and marked as the vendor's own words.

5.2 The block is labelled, inside the box, at the top. The first line inside the box reads:

Vendor-authored · paid feature · published <date> · unedited

with the block's own publication date in place of the placeholder. The wording is fixed and is not negotiable, and the label is never moved to a footnote, a caption below the block, or a line outside the box.

5.3 The block sits after the independent assessment, always: after the verdict, after the freshness stamp, after the attribute matrix and after the written assessment. A reader meets what this index found before they meet what the vendor paid to say.

5.4 The block is published unedited, and two limits are the whole of what that is subject to. A block, or a passage in one, is not published if it is:

• unlawful, or would put this site or its owner in breach of a law or of a service provider's terms; or
• presented as part of the independent assessment or as this site's own finding: written or styled as a verdict, a rating, a score, a freshness stamp, a source citation of this site's own, or an EvalIndex judgement.

Where either limit bites, this site says so in writing, names the passage and the reason, and the vendor may supply a replacement. If no publishable version is supplied within 30 days of that notice, the order is cancelled and the fee is refunded in full. Nothing outside those two limits is edited, shortened, toned down or added to.

5.5 The block carries no vendor styling. It is boxed, tinted and ruled so that it cannot be mistaken for the assessment. No supplied CSS, no brand fill, no borderless variant, no version that blends into the page. Outbound links inside the block carry the machine-readable rel="sponsored" attribute.

5.6 Buying a block changes nothing outside the box. No attribute value, no verdict, no matrix cell, no position in the table or in any listing order, and no freshness stamp changes because a vendor bought a block.

5.7 The block includes 12 months of factual updates, made on request, at reasonable effort, running from the date of purchase rather than from the date the block is published. This is the definition the paid placement policy page refers to.

Factual updates means changes to what the block already states: a changed price, a changed licence, a new supported language, a corrected link, a changed support commitment, a changed roadmap date, and the correction of an error in the block. It does not mean a rewrite, a new section, a longer block, or replacing the block's subject with a different product.

On request, at reasonable effort means what it says and no more. Updates are made when the vendor asks for them: this site does not watch a vendor's own pages to find changes on the vendor's behalf. Requests are answered in writing, an accepted update is applied on the next build of the site after it is agreed, and where an update is refused the reason is given. No turnaround time is promised, because none can honestly be promised for work done to order.

5.8 If, during those 12 months, the record the block sits on becomes delisted or discontinued under section 4 of the inclusion criteria, the record page stays published and so does the block, in its place after the assessment, and factual updates stay available for the rest of the term. A delisted or discontinued record does leave the comparison table for the delisted or the discontinued list, so the block loses the discovery route that table gives it; its record page, and the block on it, stay at the same URL. A change in the record's verdict, its marking or its delisted state is not a refund event: the block was published as bought, and what the assessment says was never part of what the fee buys. If the record is removed from the site altogether, the block goes with it, and the fee is refunded in proportion to the whole months of the update term left unused.

5.9 So that the block can be published and stay published, the vendor grants the seller a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to publish the block's content on the record it was bought for, and to keep it published there for as long as that record is published. The licence covers that one record and nothing else: no other page, no other product, no promotional use away from the record, and no sub-licensing. The vendor keeps every other right in the block's content.

6. Refunds

6.1 The refunds these terms provide are exactly these four, and there are no others:

• the expedited fee, refunded in full, where the assessment could not be published on the terms in 4.3 (clause 4.4);
• the block fee, refunded in full, where no publishable version of the block was supplied (clause 5.4);
• either fee, refunded in full, where the order was cancelled before delivery (clause 10.1);
• the block fee, refunded in proportion to the unused whole months, where the record is removed from the site during the update term (clause 5.8).

6.2 No refund follows from what an assessment says, in either direction (clause 4.5), and no cooling-off refund arises, because the Regulations that would give one do not apply to a business buyer (clause 2.2).

6.3 A refund is made to the original payment method, in the currency the payment was taken in, and no handling charge is deducted from it.

7. What no payment can buy

7.1 No fee under these terms buys, and no fee offered to this site can buy: presence in the index; a position in the comparison table or in any listing order; a verdict; a rating; a word of an assessment; the prevention, alteration, delay or removal of an assessment; a correction, which is free to everyone on every record; or a re-assessment, which is free on request or on new public evidence.

7.2 That is a term of this contract and not only a policy. A request for any of the things in 7.1, as part of a purchase or because of one, is refused, and being refused it is not a ground for a refund.

7.3 The paid placement policy page and section 6 of the inclusion criteria state the same limits as published policy. Where these terms and those pages could be read differently about what a fee buys, the narrower reading is the one that applies.

8. What is provided, and what is not warranted

8.1 Both products are provided with reasonable skill and care. Nothing beyond that is warranted. In particular, this site does not warrant that a block will produce enquiries, traffic, sales or any other commercial result, and it does not warrant that an expedited assessment will produce a favourable finding.

8.2 The vendor is responsible for the content of its own block: that it is accurate, that it is the vendor's to publish, and that publishing it breaks no law and no third party's rights. This site does not check a block's content and does not adopt it as its own.

8.3 If a third party brings a claim against the seller because of the content of a vendor's block, the vendor is responsible for the reasonable costs and any liability arising from that claim, provided that the seller tells the vendor about it promptly and lets the vendor take part in dealing with it.

9. Liability

9.1 The seller's total liability in connection with a product, whether in contract, in tort including negligence, for breach of statutory duty or otherwise, is limited to the fees paid for the product concerned.

9.2 The seller is not liable for loss of profit, loss of revenue, loss of business, loss of goodwill, loss of anticipated savings, or any indirect or consequential loss.

9.3 Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, which section 2(1) of the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 does not allow to be excluded or restricted by a contract term or a notice; for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

9.4 These limits are agreed between businesses and are reflected in the prices in section 3. A buyer who needs a different allocation of risk should say so in writing before ordering rather than after.

10. Cancelling an order

10.1 An order may be cancelled by either side before the thing bought has been delivered: for a vendor block, before the block is published; for an expedited assessment, before the product has been moved in the queue. On a cancellation under this clause the fee is refunded in full.

10.2 Once the thing bought has been delivered, the refunds in section 6 are the only ones available.

11. Personal data

The privacy notice says what this site does with personal data. Ordering will add processing that the notice does not describe today, including a payment provider, and the notice is versioned and republished before that processing starts, not after.

12. Complaints

Write to hello@evalindex.dev, saying what went wrong and what you want done about it. The operator answers. Anything that needs a person, including anything about money, is passed to the owner, who answers or decides. Complaints are answered in writing.

13. Changes to these terms

13.1 These terms are versioned and dated. The version that applies to a purchase is the version published on this site at the moment the order was placed, and a later version never applies to a purchase already made.

13.2 Every change is published as a new numbered version in the table in section 16, with its date and what changed.

14. General

14.1 These terms, together with the pages they refer to, are the whole of what is agreed for a purchase. Nothing said in correspondence adds to them unless both sides agree it in writing.

14.2 If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest of them stands.

14.3 A right under these terms is not given up by not being used at once.

14.4 Neither side may transfer its rights or obligations under an order without the other's written agreement.

14.5 No one other than the buyer and the seller has any right to enforce an order under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.

15. Law and courts

15.1 These terms, and any purchase made under them, are governed by the law of England and Wales.

15.2 The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of these terms or out of a purchase made under them.

16. Version and changes

How these terms have changed

These terms were first published on 24 August 2026.