Terms

Muntin Digital™ · Effective May 2026 · Last reviewed 2026‑05‑02 · don@muntin.digital

1. Who I am

Muntin Digital™ is a Maryland LLC operated by Don Goldstein, doing business as a one-person digital studio. The studio is registered in Silver Spring, MD; the LLC’s registered agent is on file with the Maryland Department of Assessments & Taxation. When these terms say “the studio,” they mean the LLC; when they say “I,” that’s me, Don. There’s no royal “we.”

2. What these terms cover

Three surfaces, in this order:

1. The site itself — muntin.digital, /es/, every subdomain. Reading the library and using the free tools is governed by these terms and nothing else.
2. The Window and contact forms — sending me a message via /window/ creates no commercial relationship and no obligation. Treat it like emailing a peer; I treat it the same way back.
3. Paid engagements — full builds, the $499 audit, the $1,500 menu drop-in, the $99/mo Care Plan Light, and the $225/mo full Care Plan. Each is governed by an engagement letter signed at the start of the project. The engagement letter is the controlling document; these terms apply only where the engagement letter is silent.

3. Library and free tools

The library and the free tools are provided as a public resource. They’re free in two senses: free of charge, and free of email gates. Use them, share them, learn from them. Three caveats:

• Tool results are a first look. The free audit, GBP grader, and margin calculators give you a directional read in your browser. They do not replace an audit of your specific business by someone who knows your numbers. The $499 paid audit is the version that does that.
• The library is dated, not perpetual. Articles are dated; research notes are dated; glossary terms have a verified-on date. If a claim has gone stale, the changelog records the correction. If you spot something stale before I do, email me.
• Don’t scrape at scale. Personal use is fine, automated mirroring is not. AI search engines that respect /robots.txt are explicitly allowed (see /robots.txt for the named-agent allowlist); aggressive scrapers (CCBot, Omgilibot, ImagesiftBot) are explicitly disallowed. The corpus at /llms-full.txt is the canonical machine-readable surface.

If your use of the library or the tools causes harm to your business, you accept the risk — the studio is not liable. The full liability framing is in section 9.

4. Library content license

Library content — articles, research notes, glossary terms, checklists, and topic essays — is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). You can quote, summarize, translate, and adapt the writing, including for AI-search citation, as long as you (a) credit Muntin Digital with a link back to the source URL and (b) don’t use the work for commercial purposes without my written permission. “Commercial” means selling the content as a product, including under a paywall or as part of a paid course or paid newsletter.

What CC BY-NC does NOT cover: the studio’s tools (their source code lives in this site; they’re not sub-licensed for redistribution), the brand identity (mark, lockup, color palette, typography choices), the original photography in case studies, and any client work delivered under a separate engagement letter. Those remain proprietary to the studio or its clients respectively.

5. Paid engagements

If you hire the studio, the engagement letter spells out scope, timeline, payment schedule, and any assumptions or limitations. The four common patterns:

• Full builds (Essentials $2,500–$4,000, Full Service $5,000–$9,000, Group $8,000–$15,000+). 50% deposit at signing, milestone payment at the design-approval gate, final balance at launch. Net 15 on each invoice. Codebase, design files, and content delivered to a Git repo you own.
• $499 audit. Flat fee, payable in full at booking. 90-minute Loom + 8-page action sheet delivered within five business days. Credits toward any build started within 60 days of audit delivery.
• $1,500 menu drop-in. Flat fee, payable in full at booking. Single custom HTML menu page delivered within seven business days. Two free updates within the first 90 days; bigger asks get quoted separately.
• Care Plans ($99/mo Light, $225/mo full). Monthly recurring, billed on the first of each month via Stripe. Cancel any time with written notice; the cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period (no proration).

Late invoices accrue interest at 1.5%/mo or the Maryland statutory maximum, whichever is less. Work pauses if a payment is more than 15 days overdue. The studio runs two builds at a time, no exceptions; if your timeline slips because the studio is at capacity, you hear about it on day one with the next-available date.

6. Ownership and intellectual property

What you own. Once your invoice is paid in full, you own everything created specifically for your project: design files, website code, brand assets, original copy, and original photography. Domain registration and DNS sit in your accounts from day one (the studio never holds a domain hostage; see /never/ #1).

What stays with the studio. Templates, build scripts, the design system, internal tooling, and the studio’s own brand — the things I’d use on the next project — remain mine. The studio also retains the right to display your project in the portfolio with appropriate credit; tell me at signing if confidentiality changes that.

Third-party materials. Fonts, icons, stock imagery, and third-party code shipped in your deliverables are licensed under the originals’ terms. The engagement letter names the specific licenses where they apply; you’re responsible for keeping those compliant after delivery.

7. Client responsibilities

For a project to ship on time, I need: timely feedback (within five business days unless agreed otherwise), all content and assets you committed to provide on the calendar in the engagement letter, and approval at each design gate within the same window. Delays caused by waiting on you may push the launch date and, in extended cases, may incur a re-scheduling fee. None of that is punitive; it’s the cost of preserving the two-builds-at-a-time discipline that protects every other client.

8. Termination

By you. Cancel a build or care plan with 30 days’ written notice to don@muntin.digital. You owe payment for work completed through the termination date plus any committed costs already incurred (e.g. paid font license, paid stock imagery).

By the studio. Same notice period, plus a 15-day cure period for material breaches. If a payment is 30+ days overdue, the studio can terminate without further notice.

On termination. Whatever’s shipped is shipped — you keep the deliverables. The studio writes a brief hand-off document (codebase access, where DNS lives, who hosts the site) within five business days of termination. The exit ramp is part of the engagement.

9. Limitation of liability

The site, the library, the free tools, and any communications I send you are provided “as is.” No warranty — expressed or implied — that any of it will be perfect, complete, or fit for a particular purpose. To the fullest extent allowed by Maryland law, the studio is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from your use of the site, the library, the tools, or any service.

For paid engagements, my total liability is capped at the amount you paid the studio in the 12 months preceding the claim. Nothing in this section limits liability for fraud, willful misconduct, or anything else that can’t be limited under Maryland law.

10. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Maryland, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute — about the site, the library, an engagement, an invoice, anything — goes to the state or federal courts in Maryland. No mandatory arbitration. No class-action waiver. If you have to sue the studio, it happens in a real courtroom in front of a real Maryland judge.

11. Changes

I update these terms when something material changes (a new payment vendor, a new offer, a new license posture). The “Last reviewed” date at the top is the canonical version pointer; material changes also show up in the changelog with a paragraph explaining what changed and why.

12. Contact

Sister surfaces: /privacy.html (data policy) · /cookies.html (the three functional cookies) · /security/ (data & security — nine claims, five tests) · /never/ (five things this studio will not do) · /methods/ (where every claim on the site comes from).