Manual 5 · Vendor Defense · 5.18
How to read a web proposal before you sign it
Six lines in that paper decide what the deal really is. This page walks you down all six in order: the lock-in, the self-renewal, own-or-rent, the cost of leaving, the work itself, and what counts as results. You can check every one yourself, with a pen.
Two sets of eyes on the same paper if you've got them — one set works fine: read it twice, a day apart. No logins, no accounts, nothing technical. Print the proposal and grab a pen (no printer — read it on the screen with a notepad next to it). Give it the attention you would give a big equipment purchase, not a five-minute skim. An evening covers a clean proposal. A bad one takes two, because the second read is where the trouble shows and the first read trusts things. If it runs to two nights, that's the paper, not you. Nothing gets signed on night one either way.
No proposal in your hands yet, or paying for something you never got a copy of? Both have the same first move, and it's a test in itself: "Email me the complete contract — every page, including anything the paper points to by link." Send that in email, not over the phone, so the ask carries a date.
A vendor courting you who won't send the full paper before a card number is Line 0 failing. If you are already being billed, asking for your own copy is normal — but whether it shows up, and how fast, is not in your hands. A summary sheet handed over as "the contract" is a stall wearing a tie. Give it five business days, ask once more in writing, then stop chasing paper: pull twelve months of charges off your card statement instead. That is the record they cannot keep from you, and fighting the bill runs that road.
Read it like a sub's bid
You already know how to read paper that can cost you money. A sub's bid gets the treatment: you check the line items, you check the allowances, you find the "TBD" that turns into a change order in month two. A web proposal is the same document in nicer fonts. Read it the same way.
Unlike a padded bid, which costs you on one job and is over, a bad web contract keeps charging every month after the work stops. So read this one slower than a bid.
Before you read a line, check the order of events
An honest vendor shows you the full terms before taking a card number. The con runs in the other order. One owner's account: he gave a web vendor his card number first, and only after they had it did the fine print come out — including a 30 percent charge on the remainder of a 12-month term if he cancelled early.
An honest vendor has no reason to hide the terms until after payment. If anyone asks for a card before you hold every page of the paper, stop the whole read right there.
Check it: you have the complete paper, every page — including any terms that live behind a web link in the document. If the paper points at a link, ask them to print what's behind it and staple it in. And you have paid nothing. Pass or fail. If the card came first, you're done here.
Line 1The term (how long you're signed for)
What gets said on the phone and what gets written in the paper can be two different lengths. Owner accounts describe "month-to-month" out loud and a 12-month term in the contract. The paper wins. Nobody in a dispute reads the phone call.
An honest term line does three jobs. It names the length in plain months. It names the start date. It says in plain words what happens when the term ends.
Check it: highlight the term. The written length matches what they told you out loud. If it doesn't, ask why in writing, and keep the answer.
Line 2The renewal (does it re-sign you by itself)
Do not assume the law makes cancelling easy, because right now it mostly doesn't — here's the two-sentence legal picture, then back to the paper. A federal rule called "click-to-cancel" would have forced cancelling to be as easy as signing up; a federal appeals court threw it out on July 8, 2025, before it ever took effect. So that protection does not exist.
What does exist is an older online-sales law called ROSCA (the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act). It requires clear terms before a seller takes your billing info, your express consent before charges, and a simple way to stop recurring charges. Treat that as a minimum the law sets, not something that will save you. The paper is your real protection.
So demand four things in the paper itself, whatever the law says this year:
- The exact renewal date.
- The notice window: how many days before that date you must cancel.
- The cancellation method, named exactly (email, certified letter, account portal).
- All of it in writing, inside the contract, not in a phone promise.
Check it: circle all four in the paper. Any one missing means the renewal works for them, not for you.
Line 3The ownership clause (own it or rent it)
This line decides more than any other one on the page. Read for two sets of words.
The words that mean you own it:
- The site files are yours.
- The domain (your web address) is registered in your name, not theirs.
- The phone number on the site is named as yours.
- The reviews and the Google listing stay under your accounts.
- You have the stated right to move the site to another hosting company.
The words that mean you rent it: "proprietary platform." Search the paper for that phrase. The court case behind it, and what the judge did with it, sits in the scam names.
The good version exists in public. Some vendors put the ownership answer in writing on their public pricing pages before you even ask. If it can be written that plainly, your vendor can write it too.
Check it: find all five ownership items from the list above, in writing. If any one is missing, you are renting that piece, whatever the sales call said.
Line 4The exit math (what leaving early really costs)
One owner's account: he paid Angi $980 up front, got seven junk leads, and cancelled after three days. The moment he hung up, his card was charged $3,773 — a cut of the rest of the contract.
So run the math before you sign, not after. Use this frame with the proposal in front of you:
____ months remaining × $____ per month = $____ left on the contract.
$____ left × the exit percentage in the clause ( ____ %) = $____ to walk away.
Check it: you can say your worst-case exit number out loud, in dollars, before your name goes on anything. If the paper has no exit clause at all, that is not freedom. Ask it in email, in one sentence, and ask for a dollar amount: what does cancelling in month four cost me. Silence, or "we'd have to look at that," is an answer — no written exit number means the number is whatever they decide later. If none comes back in five business days, treat the worst case as the entire rest of the term and decide whether you would sign for that.
Line 5The work itself (named, or fog)
An honest proposal names things. It names the pages you'll get and the month each one lands. It names the tasks behind any monthly fee. Fog sounds like "ongoing optimization" and "continuous improvements" — paying every month for work nobody can point at. Work that can't be named can't be checked, and work that can't be checked can't be missed.
Check it: every dollar in the price maps to named work in a named month. Put a question mark next to any line you couldn't inspect the way you'd inspect a sub's work.
Line 6The reporting (calls and jobs, not impressions)
The contract should say what gets reported to you and how often. The measure that matters is the one you already use: did the phone ring, and did it turn into jobs. An impression is a count of times something appeared on a screen. A screen appearance never bought a water heater.
Check it: the word "calls" or "jobs" appears in the reporting section of the paper. If the promised reports are impressions and rankings only, ask for calls and jobs to be added in writing before you sign. And know the honest end of that ask: some vendors won't amend their paper for a one-truck shop. That's not a negotiation you lost — it's the contract telling you what the relationship will be. If they won't put it in writing before your money moves, walk.
One line item, explained: "schema markup"
Some proposals bill "schema markup" as a mystery line item, so here is what it actually is. Schema is a set of labels added to a page's code that describe what things are: this is a business, this is its phone number, these are its services. What no vendor can promise you is what Google does with them. Google's own documentation says it does not guarantee your structured data will show up in search results, even when the page is marked up correctly. It is real work, installed once and updated when the site changes. That is not a monthly task. If it shows up as its own recurring line, ask what else that line covers, and ask them to name the month it was installed.
This page is about the paper. Two questions live elsewhere:
- Is the number itself fair for your trade and your town? That's what things actually cost.
- Should you even be talking to this vendor at all? That's the five questions.
If you already signed something bad
Tonight's win: run your current contract through it
You don't need a new proposal to use this page. Pull out whatever you are paying for right now and walk it down the same checklist below. One sitting gets you seven pass-or-fail marks on paper you already signed. The exit number is the one that may not come — some contracts carry no exit clause at all. That blank is not a failed exercise; a missing exit clause is itself the finding, and it goes down as a FAIL. Write UNKNOWN where the paper is silent, and put the exit question to the vendor in email, dated.
If your current contract fails hard, don't rip anything up tonight. Use the two links above and leave clean instead.