One paragraph to add to your website RFP

Every few months someone calls me about a site they can’t get into. A vendor built it, hosted it, and registered the domain, and now the vendor is gone, or slow, or charging for every change. The site works. It just isn’t theirs.

Nobody did anything wrong. The RFP asked about design, page counts, timeline, and price. It never asked who would own what. One organization I spoke with this year had a previous vendor’s work to show for its project: a single homepage mockup.

So here is the paragraph. Put it in the RFP, and later in the contract.

1. The domain is registered in our name, in our own registrar account. The vendor gets access, not ownership.
2. Hosting is in our account, and so is every third-party service the site depends on: the form handler, the email sender, the analytics. We pay those bills directly. The vendor is a collaborator on the account.
3. The source code lives in a repository we own. The vendor commits to it.
4. The site is built on a standard, documented stack, named in the proposal, that a software engineer on our staff or one we hire could maintain.
5. On final payment, everything produced for the project becomes our property. The vendor keeps its own pre-existing tools and nothing else.
6. At handover we receive the passwords in our own password manager and a written description of how the site is put together.

Six lines. A good vendor agrees to all of them without blinking, because it’s how they already work. My own agreements say this. A vendor who pushes back on the domain or the hosting account is telling you something about the next five years.

You’re not buying a website. You’re buying something you’ll own for a decade. Write that down before the first proposal arrives.