Terms, plainly.

Most terms are written to be survived, not read. We'd rather you actually read these.

Maarifa is a small design and build studio working across Nairobi and London. When this page says “we”, it means the studio; “this site” means maarifa.studio and everything on it. Using the site means these terms apply — so they're short, and they're in the same English as everything else here. Anything unclear: hello@maarifa.studio.

The free tools are gut-checks, not verdicts. The website check-up, the robot's-eye view and the name check are automated. They fetch a page, measure what they can measure in a few seconds, and write up what they found. The build estimate is different — it fetches nothing; it scores the four answers you give it against our own typical projects and hands back a rough tier. All four are genuinely useful and genuinely limited: a machine reading a page once can be wrong, and a scoring table is a comparison, not a measurement. Read them as a second opinion from a fast, blunt friend — not as advice, not as an audit, and not as a substitute for someone who has actually looked.

So please don't bet anything on them. If the name check says a name looks free, that isn't a trademark search and it isn't legal advice — don't print the signs on the strength of it. If the check-up scores your site, that's a snapshot of one page at one moment, not a survey of your business. If the build estimate lands on a tier and a timeline, that isn't a quote — the real number comes from an actual conversation, not four multiple-choice answers. Decisions that cost real money deserve a real person: by all means start with the tool, then talk to someone. We'd rather say this plainly than hide it in a clause at the bottom.

Point the address-based ones at sites you're entitled to. The check-up, the robot's-eye view and the name check go and fetch whatever address you hand them, which means you're asking us to knock on somebody's door (the build estimate takes no address, so this one doesn't apply to it). Use them on your own site, or one you have permission to check. Don't use them to hammer a server, to probe something private, or as one small part of a larger unpleasantness — and don't script them; they're built for a person with a question, not a queue. We rate-limit them, and we'll block use that isn't in that spirit.

The report is yours. The studio's work is ours. Whatever a tool produces about your site, you can keep, print, save as a PDF, and show whoever you like — it's about you, so it's yours, and we don't want anything for it. The other direction: the writing, the design, the code, the name and the brand on this site are the studio's, and the photographs are licensed to us. Read it, quote it, link to it, learn from it — but please don't lift it wholesale into someone else's site. That's not a legal threat; it's just the thing we'd ask of anyone.

We can't promise the site is always right, or always up. We keep it accurate and we keep it running, and we care about both more than most. But things change, we make mistakes, and hosting has bad days. Nothing here is a guarantee, and the site is offered as it is. If something on it is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — that's a faster route to the outcome you want than any warranty would be.

Which means the limits are honest ones. We're not responsible for what follows from relying on a free tool, or from the site being down or wrong — losses to your business, your data or your plans. That's the trade for something we give away without asking you for so much as an email. It doesn't apply to the things nobody can sign away, and we're not trying to dodge anything we've actually done to you: if we've caused you a problem, talk to us and we'll deal with it like people.

Where we send you isn't ours. This site links out — to a client's work, to our Instagram, to WhatsApp, to a tool worth knowing about. Once you're there you're in someone else's house, under their terms and their privacy policy, not ours. The check-up will also fetch and describe pages on your site; describing something isn't endorsing it.

Your data is a separate promise, and a stronger one. What we collect, where it lives, how long we keep it, and how to make us delete it are all in the privacy notice — including the part where you can ask us to show you everything we hold or erase you entirely, and we'll just do it. Nothing on this page limits any of that.

When this changes, the date at the top changes. Small tidies we'll just make. Anything that actually affects you, we'll say plainly rather than slip past you — the same deal as the privacy notice. And if a term here ever turns out to be unenforceable, it's the term that goes, not the rest of the page.