The rules that apply to this site, and the ones that apply to the work.

Everything published on this site — service descriptions, the delivery framework, the engagement and pricing page, the insights articles — is information. It is not an offer capable of acceptance, and submitting an enquiry does not create a contract. A contract exists when both parties sign one.

We do not publish rates. The engagement and pricing page explains the reasoning at length; the short version is that a rate detached from the shape of the work is not comparable between suppliers. Any number you receive from us arrives in a written proposal, itemised by role and seniority, with the assumptions it depends on stated alongside it.

We try to keep the site accurate and current, and we correct errors when they are pointed out. We do not warrant that it is complete or uninterrupted, and we may change or withdraw any part of it without notice. Where a page makes a factual claim about how the site itself behaves — the privacy and cookies pages both do — that claim is tested in the codebase rather than merely asserted here.

• Do not submit another person's personal information through the enquiry or application forms without their knowledge and agreement.
• Do not upload anything containing malware, or anything you do not have the right to share — including a document confidential to your current or former employer.
• Do not submit commercially sensitive, classified or special-category personal information through a web form. The submit-a-requirement page says the same thing; a first enquiry does not need it, and a form is the wrong channel for it.
• Do not attempt to gain access to any part of the site, its infrastructure or its administrative surface that is not openly published.
• Do not scrape, mirror or systematically extract the content for republication, or use it to train a model presented as an alternative source of the same material. Reading it, quoting it with attribution, and linking to it are all fine.
• Do not use the forms to send bulk unsolicited commercial messages. They are rate-limited, and persistent abuse is blocked at the network.

The content, design, brand marks and code of this site belong to MENTARA or to the people we licensed them from. You may read the material, quote it with attribution and link to it. You may not present it as your own or republish it wholesale.

Ownership of engagement deliverables works in the opposite direction, and is the more important half of this section. Our standard position, stated on the engagement and pricing page and carried into the contract, is that you own the deliverables, the documentation and the decision record — during the engagement, not on final payment. We do not hold work product hostage against an invoice.

Where we bring pre-existing tooling or methodology to an engagement, that remains ours and you receive a licence to use it for the purpose it was brought in for. Which components those are is listed in the engagement document rather than left for you to discover at handover, because an undocumented dependency is a form of lock-in whether or not it was intended as one.

• Fees are invoiced as set out in the engagement document — monthly in arrears for time-and-materials and retained capacity, against accepted milestones for fixed-scope work.
• Invoices are payable within 30 days of the invoice date, unless a different period is agreed in writing.
• Amounts are exclusive of GST and any other applicable tax, which is added at the prevailing rate. Invoicing currency, applicable taxes and any withholding obligation depend on your jurisdiction and are confirmed in the proposal rather than assumed.
• Pass-through costs — third-party software, cloud consumption, licences, agreed travel — are charged at cost with evidence, never marked up.
• Where an invoice is disputed, tell us which line and why. We do not treat a disputed line as licence to withhold the undisputed remainder, and we do not suspend work over a line under genuine discussion.
• Sustained non-payment of undisputed invoices is grounds for suspension and ultimately termination, on written notice that says what is owed and by when.

Nothing on this site can be bought by clicking. There is no catalogue, no checkout, no subscription and no self-serve plan — the forms here start a conversation and nothing more. A payment only ever follows a proposal or statement of work that both parties have signed.

Every invoice references that signed document and is itemised against it, so a line on an invoice can be traced to a line in something you agreed. Rates appear in the proposal, broken down by role and seniority, alongside the assumptions the estimate depends on. This is why the site publishes no rate card: a number detached from the shape of the work is not comparable between suppliers, and the engagement and pricing page sets out that reasoning in full.

We accept bank transfer, and card or other online payment where we have made that route available to you. In every case the amount, the currency and the applicable tax are the ones stated on the invoice.

We will never ask you to pay through a channel that does not appear on an invoice we have issued — not by message, not to an account given verbally, and not to an address that differs from the one on your contract. If you receive a payment request purporting to be from MENTARA and anything about it is inconsistent with this, treat it as fraudulent and tell us before acting on it.

For your use of this website: we exclude liability for loss arising from reliance on the published content, to the extent the law permits. This is the ordinary position for informational material and is the reason the site tells you to get a proposal rather than to act on a page.

For engagement work, liability is agreed in the engagement contract, typically capped by reference to the fees paid. We do not attempt to set that cap here, and you should be wary of any supplier who tries to set one through a page you never signed.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, and for anything a mandatory consumer protection in your jurisdiction preserves.

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts at Hyderabad, Telangana have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from your use of this site.

The governing law of an engagement is a separate question, settled in the engagement contract. For a client operating in another jurisdiction it is frequently not India, and we do not treat that as a point of principle.

Before either party escalates a dispute, we would rather have the conversation. Most commercial disagreements in delivery work come from an assumption that was never written down, and the change-control record usually shows which one.