You own the code
Everything we write for you is yours, assigned to you in the contract. It lives in your repository, under your organisation, from the first commit rather than at handover.
Working with us
What your procurement team will ask
Before a company of any size signs with a supplier, someone has to answer for the risk: who owns the code, what happens to the data, who is actually doing the work, and what happens if it goes wrong. Those questions usually arrive as a questionnaire halfway through a sale.
This page answers them up front. Your Ikigai is the trading name of Your Ikigai Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15274889. If your own agreement covers any of this differently, we'll work from yours.
The short version
How we handle your code, your data and your risk
Six things we'll commit to in writing.
A named technical lead
You get the person doing the work, not an account manager relaying messages. You'll know who they are before you sign, and they answer you directly.
Every change is traceable
Work arrives as reviewed commits with a named human approver, tests and a pull request. Your audit trail is in your repository, not in our heads.
Clear rules for AI
Named providers in your agreement, commercial terms that exclude training on your data, no secrets or production data in prompts, and a person approving anything that touches money, auth or personal data.
Insured to £1,000,000
Professional indemnity, public and products liability, and cyber and data cover with Hiscox, £1,000,000 each. Certificates on request, and your procurement team can have them before you sign.
Not one person deep
Work is documented as it's done and more than one of our people knows your project, so illness or a holiday doesn't stop it. If we ever part ways, you keep the repository, the designs and the documentation.
Paperwork
What we'll sign
We're a small studio, so you won't wait weeks for a legal department to come back to you. We'll work from your paperwork where you have it, and we'll tell you quickly if something in it doesn't work for us rather than going quiet.
We're insured with Hiscox: professional indemnity, public and products liability, and cyber and data cover, each at £1,000,000, plus legal protection. Certificates go straight over on request.
- Mutual NDA, before we talk about anything sensitive
- A data processing agreement, ours or yours
- IP assignment, so the code and designs end up yours
- Your master services agreement, reviewed and signed
- Security questionnaires, answered by a person who knows the answers
no legal department, no delay
Straight answers
The questions that decide it
The same ones we'd ask before letting a supplier near our own business.
You do. The contract assigns the intellectual property in everything we make for you, and the work sits in your repository and your design files throughout. If we use open-source libraries we'll tell you which ones and under what licence. Our own tooling stays ours, and anything of ours that your project depends on comes with a licence to keep using it.
We handle as little of it as possible. Where we can work with test or anonymised data, we do. Where we need access to real systems, we ask for the narrowest permissions that do the job, use your own identity and secrets tooling where you have it, and hand back or revoke access when the work ends. We'll sign a data processing agreement setting out what we process, why, and who else is involved. Personal data never goes into an AI prompt.
Yes, with Hiscox. Professional indemnity, public and products liability, and cyber and data cover, each at £1,000,000, plus legal protection. We'll send the certificates over whenever your procurement team wants them.
Your named technical lead, our in-house design studio, and where a project needs more hands, senior developers from a bench we've worked with before. You'll know who is on your project. We don't put the work out to people we've never met, and the lead stays the same from discovery to delivery.
The code, designs and documentation are already yours and already in your hands, so leaving is a matter of revoking access, not a hostage negotiation. Care is 30 days' notice on either side. Boost, Embedded and Squad are 60 days, because those reserve a named person's time. Agency partner plans are 30 days. Builds have no notice period: if you stop, you pay for the work done to that point and the current milestone, and you keep everything finished so far. We wouldn't leave mid-emergency either. If something is broken when notice runs out, we see it through.
On a monthly plan, within working hours of 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday: if production is down, meaning nobody can use it or you can't take money, we acknowledge within two working hours and stay on it until it's stable. If something is broken but there's a workaround, we acknowledge the same working day and come back with a fix or a plan within two working days. Anything else is acknowledged within one working day and scheduled into the next cycle. Outside those hours we'll do what we can, but we don't promise cover we can't staff: round-the-clock support needs a rota, so it's agreed and priced separately.
Yes, and we're specific about it. The providers we use are named in your agreement, their commercial terms exclude training on customer data, and only what a task needs is ever sent. Secrets, credentials and production data are not. A named person reviews and approves every change. There's a fuller answer on our <a href="/how-we-use-ai">how we use AI</a> page, including what AI never does here.
Due diligence