Terms of service

Plain Spain is an independent immigration consultancy working out of Spain. These terms cover this website, the eligibility check, and the client portal, and they cover the work itself once you hire us. Anything you want to ask about them goes to [email protected].

You agree to them at the moment you buy a package or open a portal account, and both of those pages link to this one before you press the button. If something in here does not suit you, say so before you pay rather than after. We would rather have the conversation than the argument.

What we do on your case is the list printed on the package you bought, and nothing is implied beyond it. A Document Review is a review: you assemble the application, we read it line by line, we write back with the fixes, and you get one revision pass. Complete is the fuller job — we assess whether you qualify, build the document plan for your household and your consulate, prepare every form, check every document you obtain, commission and check the sworn translations, brief you for the appointment, and track the case until a decision comes back. Settled is Complete plus your first weeks in Spain: the residence-card appointment, the town-hall registration, the NIE and the bank account.

We are not a law firm and we are not a gestoría. Nothing we write to you is legal advice, and nothing on this site is either. Reading these pages, running the eligibility check or opening a case in the portal does not make us your lawyers: there is no lawyer-client relationship between us, and none of the confidentiality or privilege that comes with one. Where a case needs a lawyer, we say so and refer it to a partner immigration lawyer rather than improvising: an appeal against a refusal, an entry on a criminal record, a regulated profession that needs its qualification recognised, or an existing immigration file that has already gone wrong.

There is one route where we file for you. A Digital Nomad application going to the Unidad de Grandes Empresas is filed by us on a Complete or Settled package, if you sign a power of attorney in front of a notary — we draft the wording and you sign it. That is an administrative filing made on your instructions and nothing more. It does not make us your legal representative, and it changes nothing in the paragraph above. On every other route you file your own application.

We are not affiliated with the Government of Spain, with any consulate, or with any Spanish public body. Nobody at Plain Spain can move an appointment, speed up a decision or lean on a case officer, and any firm that tells you otherwise is selling you something that does not exist.

We do not promise you a visa. The decision belongs to a Spanish consulate, to an Oficina de Extranjería, or to the Unidad de Grandes Empresas, depending on your route. We are none of them and we sit in none of their rooms, and a complete, correct, well-documented file is still a file somebody else decides. Anyone guaranteeing an outcome is either misinformed or lying to you.

A refusal is not a failure of this service. Files that are complete, correct and properly evidenced are refused, for reasons that are sometimes written down and sometimes not. What we owe you is the work described in your package, done with reasonable care and skill. What we cannot owe you is somebody else's answer, and buying a package does not buy one.

Rules change mid-application. Consulates differ on what they will accept, how they want it authenticated, and how long you wait for an appointment. Where something is uncertain we tell you it is uncertain, in writing, at the time.

What we do promise: that we do the work in your package with reasonable care and skill; that the file we assemble is complete against the checklist your consulate publishes and the one we keep for your route; that every figure we quote you is checked against the official source it comes from, on the date we checked it; and that if we think you do not qualify we say so before you pay us anything.

Income thresholds, government fees, document lists, freshness windows and waiting times are set by Spanish law, by ministries and by individual consulates. They are not ours to set and not ours to hold still. We take each one from the official source, we write down the date we checked it, and we check it again; the visa pages show the figures and where each came from.

They still move without warning, and a consulate can apply one in a way its own published sheet does not describe. So read everything on the public pages as information given in good faith on the day it was written, not as a warranty that it is correct today or that your office will read it the same way. Where we give an estimate for our own work — gathering documents, sworn translations — we label it an estimate, because that is what it is. Appointment waits and decision times belong to the authority and sit outside every clock we keep.

Once you are a client it gets tighter. The figures in your own document plan are the ones we checked for your consulate and your household, and if one of them moves while your case is open and we learn of it, we tell you.

Answers that are true and complete. The intake asks for names, dates of birth, nationalities, passport numbers and expiry dates, your route and your household's income, and the whole document plan is built on them. We check what can be checked against what you upload — the income you declared against your statements, dates against your certificates — but we cannot check what you never told us, and a file built on a wrong answer fails late and expensively.

A valid passport, and your own attendance. The passport has to be in date with room to spare, and the portal warns you when it expires too close to your filing date. Fingerprints, biometrics and consulate appointments cannot be delegated, to us or to anybody else: you attend your own appointment, in person, wherever Spain requires a person in the room.

Your own deadlines. The portal's timeline shows every date the case turns on and what happens if it passes — how long a certificate stays fresh, the earliest day you can file, the day your legal stay ends, the window to collect a visa, the window to enter Spain, the days you have to apply for the residence card, the appeal window. We will chase you and we will remind you. We cannot attend for you.

Government money, at cost. The consular visa fee is paid at your appointment the way your consulate asks. The Spanish administrative fees (the 790 forms) are paid before filing: on Document Review you pay them and keep the receipt; on Complete and Settled we pay them for you once your balance is settled, and pass them on at what they cost us. Where we commission a sworn translation, an apostille or a legalisation for you, we pass it on at what it cost us and add nothing to it.

Documents by the dates we agree. Late or inaccurate information moves the dates, and some documents go stale while they wait. Certificate age limits depend on the document and filing office. We confirm the applicable rule before asking you to replace a certificate; when a replacement is required you obtain it at your cost.

We will not submit a document we believe to be false, or a statement of income we believe to be overstated. If we are asked to, we stop work and say why, and the refund rule below applies from that point.

The price on the pricing page is our whole fee for that package. There is no percentage, no success fee and no charge for asking us a question mid-case. It is also the figure Stripe debits: we have Stripe's currency conversion switched off, so you are charged in euros at the price shown rather than a converted local figure. If your card is not a euro card, your own bank sets the exchange rate, not us.

Third-party costs are not ours and are not marked up: government and consulate fees, sworn translations, apostilles and legalisations, courier charges, and your health-insurance premium. We quote each one in your account before we order it, and you pay it at cost.

Extra people in the household are priced on the pricing page too. Payment runs through Stripe's hosted checkout — by card, once, up front — so your card details never reach our server.

Until your balance is paid in full we do not act outward on your behalf: we do not file an application, pay a government fee, or engage a third party for you. Your uploads, your generated forms and our review continue while any amount is outstanding; the filing itself waits for the final payment.

You have fourteen days to change your mind, and you do not have to give a reason. That is the right of withdrawal Spanish consumer law gives you on anything bought at a distance — Real Decreto Legislativo 1/2007, article 102 — and the fourteen days run from the day the contract is made, which is the day you pay.

To use it, write to [email protected] and say so. Any clear statement does, and there is no form to fill in; if you would rather use one, everything it needs to say is this: I give notice that I withdraw from my contract with Plain Spain for the package I ordered, followed by the date you ordered it and your name. An email in your own words is worth exactly as much.

We start work as soon as your payment lands, because that is what somebody buying this wants, and buying a package is you asking us to begin inside those fourteen days. Two things follow from that, and they are the law's rather than ours. If you withdraw part-way through, you pay for the part already done and we return the rest — article 108.3. And once we have finished the whole job in your package, the withdrawal right is spent, because there is no withdrawing from work already delivered — article 103(a).

Our own rule is more generous than that, and it is the one that usually decides. Document preparation starts the moment we first act on your file — the first review, the first form we generate, the first translation or fee we order — and your case history shows the day. Before document preparation starts you get the whole fee back, at any point, for any reason or none, and not only inside the fourteen days. After document preparation starts, the refund is pro rata: you pay for the work already done and we return the rest. We write out how we reached the split and send it to you in the portal, so you can check the arithmetic instead of taking our word for it.

What we cannot return is money already spent with somebody else on your behalf: a government fee that has been paid, a translation that has been commissioned, an apostille already ordered. Those are yours either way, and we hand over whatever was produced with them along with the rest of your file.

A refund goes back the way it came. A card payment is reversed through Stripe to the card that paid it, and your bank usually shows it within a few working days — their timing, not ours. Money that reached us any other way goes back that other way, because Stripe can only reverse what Stripe took. A person here issues it; there is no button in your account for it and you do not need one. You get an email when it goes, and it appears in your case history.

None of this removes the rights Spanish and EU consumer law gives you. Where the law is more generous than this clause, the law wins.

Your portal account is yours alone. Do not share the password, and tell us straight away if you think somebody else has it. Changing your password signs the account out of every other browser.

Upload your own documents and those of the household you are applying with, with their knowledge. Files can be any type, up to 20 MB each. We store what you send as you sent it; anything outside the common document formats reaches our reviewers as a download rather than a preview, and we remove anything that is neither a document for the case nor something we asked for.

Keep your own copies. The portal is a working file for a live case, not a permanent archive, and any document that matters to you should exist somewhere you control as well.

We can suspend an account being used to attack the service or to upload material that has nothing to do with an application. Data in the portal is handled as the privacy policy describes.

The forms, plans, letters, checklists and translations we prepare for your case are yours. Keep them, use them, take them to somebody else if you would rather. Your account has a button that downloads all of it in one file, for as long as we still hold it — the privacy policy says how long that is.

The rest of this site is ours: the guides, the country tables, the eligibility check, the document catalogue and the words on these pages. Read them, quote them, send them to whoever needs them. Do not republish them as your own work or use them to build a competing product.

You can stop at any point, in writing, and the refund rule above decides the money. We hand over everything prepared for you so far so the file can go on without us.

We can stop too: for the reason above about documents we believe to be false, where a case turns out to need a lawyer rather than a consultancy, or where the working relationship has become abusive. In each case we say why, return the pro rata balance, and where a lawyer is the answer we introduce you to one.

If we cannot reach you at all — no answer to messages or to email over a long stretch on an open case — we may write once more and then close the case rather than hold it open indefinitely. Closing it deletes nothing: the file stays where it is, and the privacy policy's clock starts from the day it closed.

If we get something wrong we put it right where it can be put right. Where it cannot, what you can recover from us is capped at the fees you have paid us for that case, taken together across everything connected to it.

Some things were never ours to be liable for: the decision a consulate, an Oficina de Extranjería or the Unidad de Grandes Empresas makes; how long any of them, or any other third party, takes; a government fee, rule or income threshold that changes after you paid; and a document or an answer you gave us that turned out not to be true. Nor are we liable for what you commit to on the strength of a decision nobody has made yet. Do not sign a lease, sell a house or resign on the assumption of a visa you have not been granted.

Nothing in this section limits liability that cannot be limited by law: death or personal injury caused by our negligence, fraud, deliberate wrongdoing, gross negligence, and any right Spanish consumer law gives you that a clause like this one is not permitted to remove. If a court finds the cap above cannot stand in your case, then it does not stand in your case, and the rest of these terms carry on without it.

If something has gone wrong, tell us first, at [email protected]. Most of what goes wrong in a case is something a person can fix inside a week, and neither of us wants the alternative.

These terms, and any dispute about them or about the work, are governed by Spanish law, and the Spanish courts can hear a dispute about them.

If you are a consumer, that sentence does less than it looks like it does, and that is deliberate. Choosing Spanish law cannot take away the protection of the mandatory consumer rules of the country you actually live in: whatever those give you, you keep. And we will only ever bring a claim against you in the courts of the place you live. You can bring one there or here, whichever suits you better.

The date at the top is the date this text last changed. A change applies to work quoted after it; a case already quoted and paid for runs on the terms that were in force when you paid.