<p>Scholarly driven studies on metadiscourse and legal language have mostly focused on judicial materials, thereby often underexploring the metadiscursive strategies developed in contracts and agreements. This paper is aimed at filling this gap by investigating stance and engagement in online terms of service. For this purpose, a corpus of online terms of web hosting services is consulted where stance and engagement tokens are extracted and examined by following a quasi-experimental approach on the basis of which relative frequencies and words in context are examined and compared. In this way, the paper offers insights into the use and occurrences of metadiscourse elements in contractual relationships. The investigation initially reveals the presence of textual passages with distinct orientations, where sentences have business (i.e., service-oriented) or legal relevance, sometimes overlapping. By considering such distinctions, the findings indicate that texts with a predominant legal function greatly employ hedging strategies. Mitigation also appears in boosting-resembling wording. Additionally, the study foregrounds a trade-off between the need for inclusion (e.g., by using reader pronouns) and the necessity to (legally) empower service providers (amongst others, by employing self-mention). This feature mirrors a characteristic of legal language, that is the constant search for precision on the one hand, and the need for approximation, mitigation and flexibility on the other hand.</p>