Software and web development in Canada

The contract, and who owns what at the end

We are happy to contract under the law of your province, which in practice is usually Ontario or British Columbia. The agreement is between two companies for a defined deliverable, so the personal services business questions the CRA asks about individual contractors do not arise in the same shape: you are not engaging a person for their time, you are buying a scoped build from a company that carries its own team and its own risk on fixed-price work.

Intellectual property transfers to you on final payment, in writing. Repositories move to your GitHub organisation, hosting and domain accounts are registered to your company from the start rather than to us, and no licence comes back to us for anything written for you. You should never need our permission to change your own product, and you will not.

GST, HST, PST, and how invoices work

We are a non-resident supplier, so our services are generally not subject to Canadian sales tax on the face of our invoice, and self-assessment rules may apply depending on your province and your registration status. The provincial position varies enough that we will not assert a treatment on your behalf: we would rather your accountant confirmed it before the first invoice than unpicked it at year end. Our invoices carry full details for both companies and an itemised description of the work, because a thin invoice is the one that stalls in accounts payable.

Payment is by bank transfer in Canadian dollars. The usual arrangement is 30% on signing, then 30% on design approval, 30% on development complete and 10% at launch. The Canadian dollar figure is held for the project, so exchange rate movement between kickoff and delivery is our exposure rather than yours.

Privacy law: PIPEDA, Quebec Law 25, and where the data lives

PIPEDA sets the federal floor, and Alberta and British Columbia have their own private sector acts that operate in its place. If you touch Quebec, Law 25 is the one that will shape the build: it requires a privacy impact assessment before transferring personal information outside the province, express consent for sensitive information, privacy settings that default to the most protective option, and data portability. It is closer to GDPR than to PIPEDA, and it is the reason a Canadian project usually needs a data conversation in week one rather than week ten.

That assessment applies to us, because we process from India under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 rather than under Canadian law. We do not treat that as your paperwork problem: we can tell you what we process, where it sits, who can reach it and how long it is kept, in the form the assessment actually asks for. Where you need the data in Canada, hosting goes in a Canadian region and the data path is documented so your auditor can follow it without asking us.

CASL sits alongside all of that and is stricter than most teams expect. Consent has to be express or clearly implied, proof of it has to be stored with a timestamp and a source, implied consent expires, every commercial message needs a working unsubscribe and accurate sender identification, and transactional messages have to be separated from commercial ones in the code. We build that in rather than leaving it to whoever configures the mailing tool later, which is where the exposure usually ends up sitting.

Working across ten and a half hours

We will not pretend this part is ideal. India runs ten and a half hours ahead of Toronto and thirteen and a half ahead of Vancouver, so our working day finishes at half past seven in the morning in the east, half past eight once you are on daylight time, and overnight in the west either way. There is no live overlap with either, which is the plain version of a thing most agencies phrase around. Every agency in our position claims the time difference is an advantage. It is not, it is a constraint, and the honest thing is to build the working method around it.

So the method is written first. Work is handed over in writing at the end of our day, which lands as your morning: what moved, what is next, and anything that will block us if it is not answered. Questions that could stall a day are flagged before we stop rather than discovered overnight. One scheduled call a week in your morning covers the rest. Clients who need a same-hour response to everything are better served by someone in their own timezone, and we say so before a contract rather than after.

Questions Canadian clients ask