Terms of supply
Terms on which Specline is supplied
These terms govern the supply of Specline by SY Design Studio Ltd. Please read section 3 and section 5 in particular: they set out what Specline does and does not do, and where responsibility for a specification sits.
1Definitions
- We, us, our
- SY Design Studio Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, trading as Specline.
- You, the Subscriber
- The person or organisation that subscribes to the Service.
- The Service
- Specline: the software, the specification library and the calculations we make available to you.
- An Output
- A specification document you generate using the Service and issue under your own name.
- The Named Designer
- The individual identified in your practice profile as responsible for an Output.
- Approved Documents
- The Approved Documents to the Building Regulations 2010 (as amended) for England.
2The contract and how it starts
A contract is formed when we confirm your subscription. These terms apply to it in full, and they replace anything said beforehand. If you are agreeing on behalf of a practice, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and "you" means that practice.
We supply to businesses. If you are subscribing as a consumer rather than in the course of a business, tell us before subscribing, because different rights apply to you and some of the provisions below may not.
3What the Service is, and what it is not
The Service drafts specifications. It does not certify, approve or guarantee compliance with the Building Regulations, and it is not a plan check. Compliance of building work is determined by the building control body appointed for the project. Nothing produced by the Service is a certificate, an approval, an inspection, or an opinion on compliance, and nothing in it should be presented to anyone as though it were.
The Service is a drafting aid for a competent designer. It assembles text and calculations that you select, review and adopt. We do not know your project, your site, your client or your building control body, and the Service does not assess them.
Where an Output states a figure, that figure is drawn from the Approved Documents, a British Standard, the legislation or a manufacturer's published data at the date the library was last maintained. It remains for you to confirm it against the edition in force for your project.
4Your subscription
- Plans. Solo and Practice are subscriptions. Per spec is a charge for each specification you issue, with no subscription.
- Renewal. Monthly plans renew each month and annual plans each year, until cancelled.
- Cancelling. You may cancel at any time, effective at the end of the period you have paid for. You keep access until then. We do not refund part-periods, and we do not charge you again after cancellation.
- Price changes. We will give you at least 30 days' notice before a price change takes effect, and it will not apply before your next renewal. If you do not accept it, cancel before that renewal.
- Founding members. If you are among the first 30 subscribing practices, the price you join at is held for as long as your subscription runs without a break. Ending it and rejoining later ends that arrangement.
- Prices. All prices exclude VAT, which is added where applicable.
- Seats. A plan's seat limit is the number of individuals who may use the Service under it. Seats are for named individuals and are not shared.
5Your responsibilities as the designer
This section is the basis on which we supply the Service at the price we do.
- You, through the Named Designer, are the designer of record for every Output. Professional responsibility for an Output rests with you and does not pass to us at any point.
- You confirm that you are competent to prepare and issue Building Regulations specifications for the work concerned, and that you hold whatever professional indemnity insurance your work requires.
- You will review every Output before issuing it, and will check every clause, figure and table reference against the Approved Documents and standards in force at the date of your submission.
- You will not rely on the Service in place of the design of a structural engineer, a fire engineer, a waterproofing specialist or any other specialist your project requires.
- You are responsible for the accuracy of what you enter, including the practice profile that appears on the face of an Output.
6Currency of the library
We maintain the library against the Approved Documents for England. When a new edition of an Approved Document that affects the library is published, we will review and update the affected content, and we aim to do so within 90 days of the edition coming into force. We will tell subscribers when that work is done.
The Approved Documents L1 and F1 2026 editions come into force on 24 March 2027. Transitional provisions are a matter for your project, and applying them is your decision, not ours.
An Output you have already generated is not updated retrospectively. Every Output carries a notice telling the reader to confirm references against the edition in force at the date of submission; that notice is your prompt as much as your client's.
The Service covers England. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are not covered unless and until we say a region is included.
7Who owns what
- Your Outputs are yours. You own the specification documents you generate, and you may use them on your projects, under your own name, without further permission from us and without paying us again.
- The library and the software are ours. We keep all intellectual property in the Service, including the specification library, the calculations and the software. Your subscription is a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use them to produce your own Outputs.
- What you may not do. You may not extract, copy, republish, resell or redistribute the library text or the calculations, nor use them to build or train a competing product or library. Producing Outputs for your own projects is not a breach of this; supplying the underlying library to anyone else is.
- Clauses you add. Any clause you write and add on the Practice plan stays yours. We claim no rights in it and do not add it to the library.
- After you leave. Every Output you issued remains yours, in the form you downloaded it, with no time limit.
8Availability
We will take reasonable care to keep the Service available, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or fault-free, and we may suspend it for maintenance. We do not offer a service level guarantee. Where we know of planned downtime we will give reasonable notice.
9Liability
Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.
Subject to that:
- We are not liable for any loss arising from the use of an Output on a project, including the cost of remedial work, delay, abortive work, rejection or refusal by a building control body, or any claim brought against you. Section 3 and section 5 set out why: we do not assess your project, and you review and adopt every Output as the designer.
- We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of contract, loss of goodwill, or any indirect or consequential loss, however arising.
- Our total liability to you in connection with the Service, whether in contract, tort including negligence, or otherwise, is limited in aggregate to the total fees you paid us in the 12 months before the date the claim arose.
You are responsible for keeping your own copies of Outputs you rely on.
10Ending the contract
Either of us may end the contract as set out in section 4. We may suspend or end your access immediately if you do not pay, if you breach section 7, or if you use the Service in a way that is unlawful or that puts other subscribers at risk. Where we do so for non-payment we will tell you first and give you a reasonable chance to put it right.
When your subscription ends, your saved jobs remain retrievable for 60 days so that you can export them, and are then deleted. We will remind you before that period ends. Outputs you have already downloaded are unaffected. On a Practice plan, the shared job library belongs to the practice, not to an individual seat; when a seat is removed, that person's access ends and the practice keeps the jobs.
11Your data
How we handle personal data is set out in our privacy notice, which forms part of these terms. Your job records may contain personal data belonging to your clients. In relation to that data you are the controller and we are your processor, and the processing terms in the privacy notice apply.
12General
- We may change these terms. If a change materially affects you we will give at least 30 days' notice, and it will take effect at your next renewal.
- You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our written consent. We may transfer ours if our business is sold, provided your rights are not reduced.
- If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
- A delay in enforcing a right is not a waiver of it.
- Nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.
- These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.