Faayez MohammadFounder and CEO, Nexvix
Published September 20267 min read
- Ask before signing
- All six clauses below
- Red flag
- Deployment in the supplier’s account
- Nexvix default
- Your infrastructure, your accounts
The code, in your repository
Source code should land in a repository you control, during the build rather than at the end. A supplier who delivers code only at handover is a supplier whose work you cannot review or continue if the relationship ends.
Ask where the repository lives today. The answer is either your organisation or theirs, and it tells you everything.
The infrastructure and the model accounts
The system should run in cloud and model provider accounts billed to you. This is the clause suppliers resist most, because deployment inside their account is what makes a client hard to leave.
If the system runs on their account, you are renting your own workflow.
Your accounts also mean you see the real usage cost per month instead of a marked-up line on an invoice.
The data, and what was done with it
Your operational data is yours, obviously. The less obvious clauses are these: what was sent to model providers, whether it could be used for training, and what happens to derived artefacts such as embeddings and evaluation sets.
Require the evaluation set. It is the record of what “working” meant, and without it a future developer cannot tell whether a change made things better or worse.
The right to change it without them
Ownership without documentation is theoretical. Require the operating guide, the rules and thresholds in editable form, an architecture note and a recorded walkthrough.
- Admin credentials transferred, not shared
- Rules and prompts under version control in your repository
- A named list of integrations and their credentials
- One recorded walkthrough of the whole system
Exit terms you never expect to use
Ask what happens if you stop paying for support: does the system keep running? With a system deployed in your own accounts the answer is yes, which is exactly why the earlier clauses matter.
Nexvix does not require a retainer to keep a delivered system running. Support afterwards is optional and priced separately, and that is a deliberate consequence of how ownership is set up.