Terms of Enquiry

These terms govern your initial contact with us and any preliminary discussions that follow. They do not govern paid work. Any engagement we take on will be covered by a separate written agreement — a statement of work, master services agreement, or equivalent — signed by both parties. Where that agreement conflicts with anything in these terms, the signed agreement takes precedence.

Sending an enquiry, receiving a reply, or taking part in a scoping call does not create a consulting relationship, and does not oblige either of us to proceed. We may decline work for any reason, including a conflict with an existing client. No work begins, and no fees become payable, until a written agreement is in place.

Please do not send confidential or sensitive material with an initial enquiry. Until a mutual non-disclosure agreement is executed, we cannot treat what you send as confidential.

In particular, please do not include:

• Personal data about your customers, employees, or any other individual
• Health, financial, biometric, or other data in a regulated category
• Credentials, API keys, connection strings, or access tokens
• Proprietary source code, trade secrets, or documents under an existing NDA
• Sample corpora, document sets, or database extracts

Describe your problem in general terms. If we agree there is a fit, we will put an NDA in place before you share anything sensitive, and we will tell you how to transfer it securely.

We will not deliberately use enquiry content to train models, and we do not sell it. But an enquiry sent before an NDA is in place is not protected by one.

We work across many clients on similar problems — retrieval architecture, evaluation, and grounding are recurring themes in our field. If you send us an idea or proposal unprompted and outside a signed agreement, you agree that we are free to develop similar work independently, and that we owe you no compensation or attribution for doing so. This does not affect any confidentiality obligations we take on in writing later.

We use the information you submit to respond to your enquiry, assess whether we can help, and keep a record of the conversation. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in responding to business enquiries, and, where applicable, taking steps at your request before entering a contract.

We retain enquiry records for [RETENTION PERIOD] unless you ask us to delete them sooner. We share them only with our own staff and with service providers who host our systems under contract.

You have rights over your personal data, including access, correction, and erasure. To exercise them, contact [PRIVACY CONTACT EMAIL]. Full detail is set out in our Privacy Policy at retridge.com/privacy.

Anything we say before a signed engagement — in an email, on a call, or on our website — is general information, not advice you should act on. It is not legal, regulatory, financial, or compliance advice, and it is not a technical recommendation tailored to your systems. We are not responsible for decisions made on the basis of preliminary discussion.

Retrieval-augmented generation and related techniques are probabilistic. Systems built with them, including systems we help design, can and do produce output that is incomplete, outdated, or factually wrong, and can fail to retrieve information that exists in the underlying corpus.

We do not warrant that any system will achieve a particular accuracy, recall, or precision level unless that target is written into a signed agreement, and even then only against the evaluation method defined there. Retrieval quality depends heavily on the quality, structure, and consistency of your source material — factors that are usually outside our control.

Any system we help build is a decision-support tool. Where its output informs decisions that carry legal, financial, clinical, safety, or similar consequences, you remain responsible for human review and for the decision itself.

Our work often involves third-party components — model providers, vector databases, embedding services, and cloud infrastructure. These are governed by their own terms, and their availability, pricing, performance, and behaviour can change without notice to us. We are not responsible for their acts or omissions, and we do not warrant their continued availability.

Where an engagement depends on a specific third-party service, we will identify it in the statement of work so that the dependency is visible to you.

Content on our website, including text, diagrams, methodology descriptions, and branding, belongs to Retridge or our licensors. You may read and share it for your own evaluation, but you may not republish or use it commercially without our written permission.

Ownership of anything we produce during a paid engagement is dealt with in the relevant signed agreement, not here.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we accept no liability for loss arising from your reliance on our website, on preliminary correspondence, or on discussions held before a signed agreement is in place. This includes indirect and consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of data, and business interruption.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

We aim to keep our website accurate and available, but we do not guarantee either. Content may be changed or removed without notice. Technical material published there reflects our view at the time of writing, in a field that moves quickly.

We may update these terms. The version in force is the one published when you submit your enquiry, and the date at the top shows when it last changed.

These terms are governed by the laws of [JURISDICTION]. Disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of [JURISDICTION].

Questions about these terms: [LEGAL CONTACT EMAIL]
Data protection queries: [PRIVACY CONTACT EMAIL]

[REGISTERED COMPANY NAME], [REGISTRATION NUMBER], [REGISTERED ADDRESS]