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Who owns the code when LevelUp Digital builds a custom tool?

You own what we build for you, along with the repositories, accounts, and credentials.

You do. When LevelUp Digital builds something for you, the client owns the deliverable and the accounts it runs on. Nothing is held hostage if the relationship ends, and you should not accept a development agreement that says otherwise.

What ownership should mean in practice

  • The source code, in a repository under your organization, not ours.
  • The infrastructure accounts. Hosting, databases and serverless functions belong in accounts you control and pay for. If your integration runs inside an agency account, you do not own it, you rent it.
  • Credentials and API keys, issued from your platforms, revocable by you.
  • The domain and the DNS. These should never sit with a vendor.
  • The documentation, so another developer can pick it up cold.

What is not exclusively yours

Being straight about this matters more than a sweeping claim. No custom build is entirely original code. Open source libraries stay under their own licenses, which is fine and normal. Third-party platforms, hosting providers and APIs remain governed by their own terms. And general know-how, the patterns and techniques a developer carries between projects, is not something any agency can transfer or should promise to stop using. What is yours is the work product built for your business: your application, your integration logic, your configuration, your data.

What to check in any agreement

Whoever you hire, read these clauses before signing:

  • Does ownership transfer on delivery, or on final payment, and is that stated plainly?
  • Does the agency license anything back to you rather than assigning it? A license can be revoked.
  • Whose accounts does it run in, and who holds the credentials?
  • What is handed over at termination, and how quickly?

An agency that resists these questions is telling you how the end of the relationship will go. Our position is that clients should be able to run their own systems and should not be married to us, which is the same reason we do not build businesses on stacks only we can maintain. Our terms and conditions set the contractual baseline, and specific ownership language is confirmed in each engagement's agreement. Platform choices are covered in our post on choosing a tech stack. To talk through a specific build, contact us.

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