Terms of Service.

InStone is a London-based strategy and intelligence agency, operated by InStone Agency Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 15710657, with its registered office at Amisha Court, 161 Grange Road, London, SE1 3GH. These terms govern your use of this website, your subscription to any of our publications, and any commissioned work we undertake for you.

By using this website, subscribing to a publication, or commissioning work, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please stop using the site and contact us at info@instone.one so we can tell you what has gone wrong.

For the purposes of these terms, references to "InStone", "we", "us", or "our" mean InStone Agency Ltd. References to "you" or "your" mean the person using the website, subscribing, or commissioning work.

Website: the InStone website at www.instone.org.uk and any pages or subdomains under it.

Publications: the free weekly Briefs (RedStone and BlueStone), the paid Specialist Briefs, and any bespoke editorial output delivered by subscription.

Subscriber: a person who has signed up to receive any of our Publications, paid or free.

Engagement: any commissioned work we undertake for you, from a Focused single-framework piece of work through to a Full Strategy engagement or a Commissioned intelligence study.

Client: a person or organisation that has commissioned an Engagement.

You may use this website to read, navigate, subscribe, and enquire. You may share individual pages by link. You may print pages for personal or internal use.

You may not scrape the site at volume, attempt to circumvent any security measure, attempt to access any private area, use automated tools to harvest subscriber-only content, or do anything that would put the site or our subscribers at risk.

Reasonable, good-faith use is always welcome. If you want to do something the site does not obviously permit (republish a full essay, syndicate a brief, etc.), ask us: info@instone.one.

Subscribing takes two steps. After you submit the form we send a single confirmation email with a link. Nothing else is sent until you click it, and if you never click it you receive nothing further and the record is removed. This protects you from being signed up by somebody else using your address.

The RedStone Brief and BlueStone Brief are provided free of charge. Subscribing is free, delivery is free, and you can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the bottom of any email.

We do not guarantee uninterrupted delivery. The service is provided as-is, free of charge, and we reserve the right to change what it covers, to pause it for short periods, or to discontinue it entirely, with reasonable notice to subscribers where discontinuation is permanent.

Content in free Publications is provided for informational purposes and for personal reading. It is compiled from primary institutional sources using our editorial workflow, which may include AI-assisted tooling. While we take reasonable care in compiling each issue, we do not warrant that every item is accurate, complete, or suitable for any specific decision, and readers are expected to verify specific points before acting on them for material matters.

You may forward individual issues to colleagues. You may not republish, syndicate, or systematically redistribute the content without written permission.

Specialist Briefs are billed either monthly (£24 per brief, per seat) or annually (£240 per brief, per seat, approximately two months free). Prices are shown on each brief's page and are fixed for the duration of your paid period unless you expand scope.

Every paid subscription begins with a 14-day free trial. Your payment method is collected at signup but not charged until day 14. Cancelling any time during the trial means no charge is made and your access ends at the trial's close.

Subscriptions auto-renew on the same date each billing cycle until you cancel. Cancellation can be made any time via the Stripe customer portal linked in every email we send you, and takes effect at the end of the current period. You keep access through to the end of any period you have paid for.

Refunds are not issued for subscription periods partially used, except where required by consumer protection law. Consumer subscribers in the UK and EU may have a 14-day cooling-off period for digital services where statutory rights apply, and the free trial serves this purpose in practice. Contact us at info@instone.one to exercise any statutory right. If we make a material change to a brief mid-period (for example a substantial scope reduction), we will credit or refund the remaining period on request.

Two or more Specialist Briefs can be bought together as a single subscription. A bundle is one Stripe subscription covering every brief you picked, at the same per-brief, per-seat rate, on one invoice, with one renewal date. Because it is a single subscription, cancelling it cancels every brief in it at the same time. Individual briefs within a bundle cannot be cancelled separately. If you want to be able to stop one brief while keeping another, buy them as separate subscriptions.

Subscriptions can be purchased for one seat or up to ten seats, billed to a single payer at the same per-seat rate. The payer manages the subscription; recipient seats can be reassigned by emailing info@instone.one. Organisation subscriptions above ten seats are agreed by contract and invoiced separately.

Failed payments result in a suspension notice after a reasonable grace period. We will contact you in writing before any action on the account.

Every Engagement is scoped, timed, and priced in writing before work begins. Our standard terms apply unless we sign a different master agreement with you.

Scope and deliverables: the specific deliverables, timeline, and price are set out in the scoping brief you sign before work starts. Scope changes mid-engagement are negotiated in writing before work continues, not after.

Payment terms: unless we agree otherwise in writing, invoices are net 30. For engagements above a certain threshold, we typically split payment: a portion at sign-off of the scoping brief and the balance at delivery.

Delivery: we deliver on the timeline set out in the scoping brief. If a phase is delayed by input we are waiting on from you, the timeline is extended accordingly and communicated in writing.

Sign-off: each phase of an Engagement is gated on written sign-off from you. We do not proceed to the next phase until the current phase is signed.

Cancellation: you can cancel an Engagement at any gate. You are liable for work completed up to the cancellation date, plus any committed third-party costs we cannot recover.

Website and Publications: all content on this website and in our Publications (including text, design, illustrations, and typography) is owned by InStone or licensed to us. You may not copy, reproduce, adapt, or systematically redistribute it without written permission.

Commissioned deliverables: the intellectual property in deliverables created for a specific Engagement transfers to the Client on full payment, unless we agree otherwise in writing. Our underlying frameworks, methodologies, templates, and know-how remain our property and are licensed to you for your use of the deliverable.

Pre-existing materials: materials we create outside the Engagement, or licensed materials from third parties, remain the property of their respective owners. Where these are embedded in deliverables, we grant you the licence you need to use the deliverable as intended.

Our right to refer to the Engagement: unless you specifically request otherwise in writing, we reserve the right to name the Engagement and the client at a general level for reference purposes, without disclosing confidential content or specific outputs.

When you submit a brief through our contact form, propose a speaker, reply to a publication, or otherwise send us content, you warrant that you have the right to share it with us.

We treat everything you share with us as confidential by default, even without a specific NDA, unless the content is clearly intended for public use (for example a proposed speaker's published biography).

You grant us a limited, internal licence to read, review, and respond to what you send. We do not use your submissions for any other purpose without asking you first.

For Engagements, a mutual non-disclosure agreement is signed before scoping begins. The NDA governs everything exchanged during and after the Engagement in specific detail.

For enquiries and scoping conversations that do not proceed to Engagement, we still treat the content shared as confidential and delete or archive it in line with our Privacy Policy retention schedule.

We do not share client lists, specific project outputs, or confidential context with any third party without explicit permission.

Our work is produced with professional care, applied to the scope agreed in writing. We do not warrant that publications or deliverables are error-free, uninterrupted, or suitable for any purpose beyond the scope agreed in writing with you. To the extent permitted by law, all warranties, terms, and conditions implied by statute, common law, or custom (including those implied by the Sale of Goods Act 1979 and the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982) are excluded.

To the extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability to you arising from or in connection with these terms, any Publication, or any Engagement, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty, misrepresentation, restitution, or otherwise, is limited to: (a) for Engagements, the fees actually paid by you to us under the specific Engagement giving rise to the claim in the twelve months preceding the event, or five thousand pounds, whichever is greater; and (b) for Publications and use of this website, one hundred pounds or the fees paid by you to us for the affected Publication in the twelve months preceding the event, whichever is greater.

We are not liable to you, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty, or otherwise, for any: loss of profit, revenue, or business; loss of anticipated savings; loss of goodwill or reputation; loss of use or corruption of data or information; loss of opportunity; business interruption; or any indirect, consequential, or special loss or damage, in each case howsoever arising, and even if we were advised of the possibility of such loss.

Any claim against us must be notified to us in writing within twelve months of the date on which the event giving rise to the claim first arose. Claims notified after that period are waived.

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for: fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; death or personal injury caused by our negligence; any breach of the terms implied by section 12 of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 or section 2 of the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982; any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded; or our express indemnity obligations under Section 10.

You indemnify us against any loss, damage, cost, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) we suffer or incur arising from: your misuse of the website, Publications, or deliverables; your breach of these terms; any content, data, or instructions you submit or provide to us that infringe a third party's rights or violate applicable law; and any regulatory or legal action taken against us that results from information you provided being materially inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading.

We indemnify you against any third-party claim that our commissioned deliverables (as defined in Section 6), used in accordance with the scope agreed in writing, infringe a third party's UK intellectual property rights. This is our sole liability and your sole remedy for any such claim, and it is subject to the liability cap in Section 9. This indemnity does not extend to free or paid Publications, which are provided as-is.

Our indemnity in this Section does not apply to the extent a claim arises from: modifications made by you or on your behalf without our written approval; use of a deliverable outside the scope, purpose, or field of use agreed in writing; combination of a deliverable with materials, data, or systems not supplied by us where the claim would not have arisen but for that combination; or our compliance with your specific instructions or content you supplied.

For an indemnity claim under this Section to be valid, you must: notify us in writing within thirty days of becoming aware of the claim; give us sole control of the defence and settlement (provided any settlement does not admit fault on your part or impose non-financial obligations on you without your written consent); provide reasonable assistance at our expense; and not make any admission or settlement without our prior written consent.

If a deliverable becomes, or in our reasonable opinion is likely to become, the subject of an infringement claim, we may at our option, and at our cost: procure the right for you to continue using the deliverable; modify the deliverable so it is no longer infringing while maintaining substantially equivalent functionality; or refund the fees paid for the affected deliverable and terminate your right to use it.

Neither party will be liable to the other under any indemnity in these terms for indirect, consequential, or special losses. The indemnities in these terms are the sole indemnities between us in respect of the matters they cover.

Neither party is liable for failure to perform or delay in performing any obligation under these terms to the extent the failure or delay is caused by an event outside its reasonable control, including but not limited to acts of God, war, terrorism, civil unrest, industrial action not involving that party's own workforce, epidemic or pandemic, government action, failure of public infrastructure or telecommunications, and failure of any third-party service on which performance depends.

The affected party will notify the other as soon as reasonably practicable and use reasonable efforts to mitigate the effect. If the force majeure event continues for more than sixty days, either party may terminate the affected Engagement or subscription by written notice, with fees paid but not yet earned refunded on a pro-rata basis.

You may not assign, transfer, or otherwise deal with your rights or obligations under these terms without our prior written consent, which will not be unreasonably withheld.

We may assign, transfer, or subcontract our rights or obligations under these terms in connection with a group reorganisation, sale of the business, or engagement of specialist subcontractors. We remain responsible for the acts and omissions of any subcontractor as if they were our own.

A failure or delay by either party to enforce any provision of these terms does not waive that provision or any other provision, and does not prevent later enforcement.

If any provision of these terms is held by a court of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue in full force, and the invalid provision is treated as modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it valid and enforceable while preserving the parties' original intent as closely as possible.

A person who is not a party to these terms has no right under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 to enforce any provision of these terms.

These terms, together with any signed scoping brief or master agreement referenced in them, constitute the entire agreement between the parties in relation to their subject matter and supersede any prior representations or agreements, whether written or oral.

We update these terms from time to time as our services or the law change. Material changes will be announced to subscribers by email before they take effect, and updated terms will be posted here.

The date at the top of this page shows when we last updated it. Your continued use of the website, publication, or engagement after the effective date of any change constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. Any dispute is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales, except where mandatory consumer protection law in your jurisdiction gives you additional rights.

Questions about these terms, including anything that looks ambiguous or contradictory, can be sent to info@instone.one. A human reads every message and responds within five working days.