Employer is a mid-size fintech, about 600 people. My contract assigns inventions "relating to the company's field of business" with no time or equipment qualifier. My side project is a habit tracker with 60 paying users, built entirely on my own laptop outside work hours. I have been quietly not thinking about this for a year and it is starting to bother me. What do people actually do here?
Hygiene, regardless of what the clause says. Own laptop, own accounts, own domain registrar, own email address on every signup. Never on the corporate VPN, never during work hours, never a commit timestamped 14:30 on a Tuesday. If anyone ever argues about it, the argument will be about evidence, and the evidence is your git history and your billing records.
"Field of business" is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence and it is not infinitely elastic. A habit tracker is not fintech. The realistic risk here is not a court case, it is a manager who finds out sideways and feels blindsided — which is a relationship problem you solve by telling them first.
One hour with an employment lawyer in your own country costs less than a month of your hosting and gets you an actual answer about your actual contract instead of a thread of people describing different legal systems to each other.
The honest downside of asking: it puts the project on record, and if your employer is hostile or the company is being acquired, you may prefer not to raise it while you are still there. Depends entirely on the organisation, and you know yours.
Fair, read the room. But "they never knew" is not a defence, it is a postponement, and it postpones to the worst possible moment — usually due diligence on an acquisition of your side project.
@ines_marchetti · 4w ago · 3 replies
Two questions decide it, and neither of them is answerable on a forum: what does your contract limit assignment to (company time, equipment, confidential information, or genuinely everything), and what does your jurisdiction override regardless of what the contract says. Several places void assignment of work done entirely on your own time and equipment outside the employer's line of business. Several others do not.
The practical move is duller than the legal question. Ask for a written waiver. One paragraph naming the project, signed by someone with authority. Most managers sign it without blinking because a habit tracker is obviously not competitive with a payments company.
Ask before there is meaningful revenue. Right now it is a small conversation. At $200k ARR it is a negotiation.
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@bedroomsynth · 4w ago
Asked. Legal came back in five working days with a signed carve-out naming the app and the domain. I had spent a year constructing an entire imaginary confrontation.
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@lena_arbogast · 4w ago
Same experience, and this is the pattern: the awkwardness is entirely imagined until money is involved, at which point it stops being imagined. The window for the easy version of the conversation is now.
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