Service agreement
The single contract for one client job, combining the project scope and the legal terms without a separate umbrella MSA.
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What it is
A service agreement is the whole deal for one engagement in one contract: scope, fee, payment terms, intellectual property, confidentiality, liability, and how the work ends. Unlike an MSA plus SOW setup, it does not sit above a stream of future projects. This document governs this job by itself.
Reach for it when the client is likely to hire you once, the engagement is contained, and two linked contracts would create more paperwork than clarity. The scope should still be countable, with exclusions, revision limits, acceptance criteria, and a payment schedule. Web designers have had a plain-English starting point since 2008, when Andy Clarke published Contract Killer openly for anyone to adapt, on the argument that a contract a client can actually read is a contract they are more likely to honour. Start from something and have a lawyer check it, rather than starting from nothing. If the relationship turns into repeat work, move the reusable legal terms into an MSA and issue a short SOW for each new project.
Gotcha: attaching a proposal can create two versions of the scope. State whether the proposal is incorporated, and add an order-of-precedence clause saying which document wins when wording conflicts. Otherwise the sales page and the signed contract can promise different jobs.
Ask AI for it
Draft a standalone service agreement for the one-off engagement below, ready to upload to DocuSign as an envelope. Include countable deliverables, exclusions, two revision rounds, acceptance criteria, a payment schedule with Net 15 terms, client dependencies, IP transfer only after final payment, a pre-existing-tools carve-out, confidentiality, a liability cap, termination, and signature blocks. Add an order-of-precedence clause covering the agreement and any attached proposal. Use plain English, mark every fact I must fill in, and keep it under four pages.