Ask for your money back, any time, and we will not ask why

Most software companies will refund you. Almost none of them make it easy, because the friction is the policy: a window that closed, a form that asks why, a support queue that answers on Tuesday. The refund is technically available and practically annoying, and the annoyance is doing the work.

We have taken the other side of that. On your billing page, beside the cancel button, there is a second button that says what you would get back — an actual number, before you click — and pressing it returns that money to the card you paid with and ends the subscription. There is no window. There is no reason field. You do not have to have a complaint.

How the number is worked out

A period is a number of days and you paid for all of them. The refund is the days you have not used, at the rate you actually paid — after any discount, because a discount reduced what was charged and it should reduce what comes back in the same proportion.

Three seats of a $18/seat plan is $54 for a 30-day month. Cancel on day 6 and 25 days are unused, so the refund is 5400 × 25 ÷ 30 — $45.00. That figure is on the button before you press it, and it is produced by the same function that writes the credit note, so what you were shown and what you were given cannot disagree.

Where it rounds, and which way

Three things in that sum are not exact, and all three round toward you. This is not generosity for its own sake — it is the only rule that does not require a customer to check our arithmetic.

• A part day is a whole unused day. Cancel with ten minutes of the month left and you are still owed that day. The alternative is a screen telling somebody they have zero days left while their software is still working.
• The days in the period round down. A 30-and-a-half-day month is billed as 30, which makes each remaining day worth slightly more.
• The money rounds up. $233.33 of refund is $233.34.

Each is worth pennies. Together they mean nobody has ever been handed a refund a penny short of what they could argue for, and that is worth more than the pennies.

What is not refundable, and why

Metered usage. If you sent 40,000 emails and then cancelled, you sent 40,000 emails. Refunding those would mean anyone could run a month of metered work and then ask for it free, and the cost of that lands on the customers who do not.

The subscription is what you prepaid for time you did not take. Usage is what you already had.

Why you get a credit note and not an edited invoice

An invoice we have issued is a historical document. We never go back and change one — not the total, not a line, not even to correct something in your favour. Your accounts department filed that number, and a supplier who quietly rewrites issued invoices is a supplier whose numbers cannot be reconciled.

So a refund is a second document: a credit note, with its own sequential number, that says how much of the first is being given back. It is the accounting norm, it is what an auditor expects to find, and it means the trail from charge to refund is two documents that both still exist.

The honest part: this is policy, not contract

Our terms of service still say that fees are non-refundable except where the terms, the service level agreement, or the law require otherwise. We have deliberately not changed that, and we would rather tell you than have you find it.

What that means in practice: this is a commitment we are making and keeping, not a right you could enforce in a court. We think saying so is better than the alternative — a marketing page promising an entitlement the contract quietly denies, which is two contracts and a customer reading the wrong one.