The agreement between you and HWD-Builds when you use HWD — designing a home in the Studio, the floorplans and renders it draws, and the cost estimates that follow.
HWD is operated by HWD-Builds, ABN 73 151 582 872, of Queensland, Australia ("HWD", "we", "us"). "You" is the person using it. Contact: our contact page.
By creating an account or using any part of hwdbuilds.com, you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, don't use it.
You must be at least 18 and able to enter a contract. If you're using HWD for a company, trust or partnership, you confirm you're authorised to bind it, and "you" means both you and that entity.
HWD is a design-first tool for people planning a home in Australia.
You describe the home you want, in your own words. HWD reads that into a brief, asks what your words left open, and draws floorplans from it. From there you shape the design — move rooms, change the roof, change materials, walk through it, and turn it into renders and other visualisations. If you already have a plan, you can upload it and HWD will trace it into something you can work with.
Alongside the design, HWD estimates what it would cost to build, and can read builder quotes into a form you can compare.
Everything HWD produces is made for one purpose: so you arrive at a designer, a certifier or a builder knowing what you want and roughly what it costs, instead of finding out afterwards.
You sign in with your email address and a password, or with your Google account. Confirming an address and resetting a password use a code we email you, not a link. Anyone with access to your inbox or your Google account can reach your designs — keep both secure, use a password you don't use anywhere else, and tell us through our contact page if you think someone else has got in.
A sign-in link works once and expires 20 minutes after we send it. Don't forward one to anyone you don't want in your account.
When you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address and profile picture. We never receive your Google password, and we get nothing else from your Google account.
An account is for one person. Give us accurate details, keep them current, and expect to be responsible for what's done through your account.
The design starts as a conversation. You type what you want; HWD interprets it and turns it into rooms, sizes, arrangements and materials.
Interpretation is the whole point, and it means results vary. Two people describing the same home will get different houses. The same description, asked twice, may give different results. HWD can misread you, miss something you said, or make an assumption you didn't intend — which is why every design stays editable and nothing is fixed until you say so.
HWD designs homes: houses, apartments, townhouses, villas, duplexes and granny flats, on one or two storeys. It will tell you when something is outside what it can draw.
Read what it gives you before you act on it. Check the room sizes, check the count, check that the home it drew is the home you described.
Plans are drawn to nominal room sizes on a nominal block. They take no account of your actual land, orientation, easements, setbacks, overlays, soil class, bushfire or flood risk, covenants, body corporate rules, or any planning or building requirement. Dimensions are approximate and not survey-accurate. Structure — spans, beams, footings, bracing — is indicative only and must be designed by an engineer.
Renders, room views and walkthroughs are artist's impressions produced by software. They show an idea of a home, not a photograph of one that exists. Lighting, proportions, materials, finishes, fittings, furniture, landscaping and outlook are illustrative, will not match the built result exactly, and in some cases show products or finishes we do not supply and have not priced.
Do not use a render to sell, market or advertise a home to anyone else as if it were the finished article.
When HWD traces a plan you upload, it estimates scale and room boundaries from an image. Treat every dimension it reports as approximate until you've checked it against the original drawing.
Every cost figure HWD shows — the budget range, the rate per square metre, the cost of a change, the gaps priced in a quote comparison — is an estimate expressed as a range.
We work to make estimates useful, but we don't warrant that any figure is accurate, complete or achievable. Don't rely on an HWD number alone to buy land, set a loan amount, sign a contract or turn a builder down.
You can upload floorplans, photographs, builder quotes and similar documents, up to 20 MB each, as JPG, PNG, WEBP or PDF.
We store it privately, in your own area, readable only by your account. We process it to produce your designs, estimates and comparisons. We don't publish it, sell it, or hand it to builders or anyone else, except as section 15 describes and then only with your consent.
Files are stored in Australia. Processing by the reading service in section 9 may happen outside Australia.
Keep your own copies. HWD is not a document archive and we don't guarantee to hold your files indefinitely.
The plan engine that sizes and draws your home is ours, and it runs in your browser. A service provider working for us does a set of specific jobs around it: reading your words into a brief, suggesting an arrangement of rooms, tracing an uploaded plan, generating renders, and extracting the figures from a builder quote. For those we send the relevant text, images and documents to that provider, which processes them on our behalf and may do so outside Australia.
What it reads can be wrong. It can misread a figure, miss an exclusion, mistake a provisional sum for a fixed price, draw a room that doesn't work, or fail on a poorly scanned page. HWD flags what it could not read, but it cannot flag what it did not notice.
Check anything important against the original before you act on it. Where a comparison says a quote excludes something, confirm it with the builder in writing.
We do not permit your content to be used to train the provider's models.
Your material stays yours. Your brief, your projects, your uploaded plans and documents — we claim no ownership of them.
What HWD generates for you — your floorplans, renders and walkthroughs — is yours to use for your own building project. That includes showing it to your designer, engineer, certifier, builder, lender or adviser, and having them work from it as a concept. We keep ownership of the underlying tools and of any material we license from others, and we may produce similar designs for other people: a home drawn from a common brief is not exclusive to you.
HWD itself belongs to us — the site, the Studio, the plan engine, the cost model, the wording and the brand.
To run the service, you give us permission to host, copy, store, display and process your content, and to pass it to the providers we use (hosting, storage, payment, email and the reading service in section 9). That permission lasts while your account is open and for as long afterwards as the law requires us to keep records. It lets us run and improve HWD — not publish your material or sell it.
Designing with HWD is free. Some deeper features are paid, or will be.
| What | Price |
|---|---|
| Design Studio — describe, draw, edit, render, walk through, save | Free |
| Budget range from your design | Free |
| Stage guide | Free |
| Cost Analysis — full quote extraction, gap pricing, side-by-side comparison and the questions to ask each builder | [$PRICE] AUD, incl. GST |
Paid features are bought once, for one build project. They are not subscriptions and do not renew. Buying one unlocks it for that project while your account is open. A separate project is a separate purchase.
We'll always show the price before you pay, and we'll tell you before anything that is free today becomes paid.
Prices are in Australian dollars and include GST. We'll issue a tax invoice to your account email.
Payments are handled by our payment provider. Your card details go to them, not to us — we never see or store them, and the provider's own terms apply to that part of the transaction.
If a payment fails, is reversed or is charged back, we may suspend the paid features while we sort it out with you.
Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law — among them that services are supplied with due care and skill and are fit for the purpose we describe. If we fail one of those guarantees you may be entitled to a remedy, including a refund for a major failure. Nothing in these terms limits those rights, and where anything here conflicts with them, they apply.
If a paid feature hasn't given you something useful, tell us within 14 days of buying it and we'll refund it in full. After that, a refund is at our discretion unless a consumer guarantee applies. Refund requests go through our contact page.
When HWD reads a quote, it reports what the document says and what it leaves out. It does not rate, rank, score, endorse or recommend any builder, and a gap we price is not a finding that a builder has done anything wrong — quotes legitimately differ in what they include.
No builder pays to appear in HWD, to appear differently, or to be recommended. If that ever changes, we'll label it plainly wherever it appears.
Your comparison is produced for you, from an automated reading that may be wrong. If you send it on — to a builder, a broker, a forum or anyone else — check it first, and don't present it as an authoritative statement about that builder's pricing or conduct. You're responsible for what you publish.
HWD gets better at estimating as it sees more real quotes and real prices. We'd like to use the numbers in yours to improve estimates for everyone.
We'll only do that with your consent, and only after removing what identifies you: your name, your address, your contact details and the builder's identifying details. What's kept is the shape of the numbers — rates, allowances, inclusions, region, date.
De-identified data may be used to improve the cost model and to publish aggregate market guides. We won't publish anything traceable to you, your property or a single quote. You can withdraw at any time by telling us through our contact page; that stops future use, though data already blended into an aggregate figure can't be pulled back out.
Use HWD to design and plan your own home. Don't:
HWD is early, and being built in the open. Features change, appear and disappear; the design engine is improved; cost data is revised; a render you generated last month may not be reproducible today. We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of it, and we'll give reasonable notice where a change materially reduces something you've paid for.
We don't promise uninterrupted availability. The service depends on third parties — hosting, storage, payment, email and the reading service — and on things outside our control.
If we withdraw a paid feature you've bought and haven't used, we'll refund a fair proportion of what you paid.
You can stop using HWD at any time, and delete your account yourself from your account page, or ask us to through our contact page. Deletion removes your projects and uploaded files, except where we have to keep records for tax or legal reasons, and except for de-identified data already contributed under section 15.
We may suspend or close your account if you breach these terms, if we're required to, or if we stop offering the service. If we close it for a reason that isn't your breach, we'll refund the unused part of anything you've paid.
Export anything you want to keep before you close your account.
Read this with section 13: nothing below limits a right you have under the Australian Consumer Law that can't be excluded.
Where the law allows us to limit our liability for failing a consumer guarantee, our liability is limited to re-supplying the service or paying the cost of re-supply.
Otherwise, and to the extent the law allows:
You're responsible for loss we suffer because you uploaded something you had no right to upload, or used HWD in breach of section 16.
How we collect, use, store and disclose personal information is set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms. We handle personal information in line with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles.
We may update these terms. If a change is material we'll tell you by email or in the product before it takes effect, and the new version applies from its effective date. If you don't accept a change, stop using HWD and ask for a refund of anything you've paid and not used. The version and date at the top of this page always show what's current.
These terms are governed by the law of Queensland, Australia, and you and we submit to the courts of that place.
If something's gone wrong, tell us first through our contact page, with what happened and what you'd like done. We'll reply within 5 business days and try to sort it out with you before either of us takes it further.
If any part of these terms can't be enforced, the rest still stands.