Refund Policy

1. Summary

2. When You Are Eligible for a Refund

We will issue a refund in the following situations:

• First charge on the account: a full refund within 7 days of the first charge if you have not used a material portion of the included monthly word allowance for the period being refunded.
• Duplicate charge or technical billing error caused by us: a full refund of the duplicate or erroneous portion as soon as we confirm the error.
• Service unavailability that we acknowledge: where the Service has been unavailable for a substantial portion of a billing period due to a fault on our side, a pro-rated credit or refund for the affected portion of the period.
• Unauthorised charge that the account holder did not approve: a full refund once we have verified the account, subject to a security review and (if appropriate) a temporary lock on the account during the review.
• Where required by mandatory law: any other refund required by the consumer-protection law of your jurisdiction (see Section 9 below).

3. When Refunds Are Not Available

Refunds are not normally available in the following situations, except where required by law:

• Renewal charges on a recurring subscription, where you forgot to cancel before the renewal date. Renewal reminders are sent before each renewal as a courtesy; you remain responsible for cancelling on time.
• Charges for a one-time access pass that has already started, after the cooling-off window has expired or after a material portion of the included usage has been used.
• Promotional or discounted charges where the discount was conditional on a specific commitment (for example, an annual prepayment in exchange for a lower price).
• Charges associated with a pattern of abuse, multi-account creation to claim trials or promotions, scraping, automated bulk processing, account-sharing, or use of the Service to misrepresent authorship to a third party in breach of our Terms.
• Pro-rated refunds for unused time on a paid period that you have already started, except where our Subscription Agreement says otherwise.

4. How to Request a Refund

To request a refund, email support@shadowtext.ai from the email address on your account. Please include:

1. The email address on the account.
2. The date of the charge you want refunded and, if you have it, the receipt number or last four digits of the card / masked Alipay account ID.
3. A short explanation of why you are asking for a refund.

We aim to respond to refund requests within two business days. Where the request is straightforward and falls within the eligibility criteria above, we will process the refund within five business days of approval. Refunds are returned to the original payment method; processing time at your bank, card issuer, or Alipay can add several additional days.

5. Refunds Involving Promotions, Trials, and Discount Codes

Charges that include a promotional discount, an introductory price, a trial conversion, or a one-time discount code are evaluated under the terms of the original promotion. Where the promotion offered a price contingent on a specific commitment (for example, a yearly prepayment in exchange for a deeper discount), refunding the charge will normally void the discount and require us to recalculate the amount we keep for the period actually used.

Where a promotional code can only be redeemed once per account and you redeemed it on a previous account that we then refunded, the code is treated as used and is not available for re-redemption on a new account. Attempting to re-redeem an already-used code by creating a new account is a breach of our Terms of Service and may, in addition, lead us to refuse refunds on the new account.

Where a free trial converted to a paid subscription and you missed the conversion notice, contact us at support@shadowtext.ai. We will look at the request on its merits, taking into account whether you used the Service after the trial converted, whether you opened the conversion-notice email, and whether the request reached us promptly. We try to be reasonable in good-faith cases.

6. Identity Verification for Refund Requests

To protect account holders against unauthorised refund requests, we will only act on a refund request that comes from the email address on the account, or from a payment-method holder we can identify through the original payment trail. Where there is doubt — for example, when the request comes from a different email address, or when the account has shown signs of compromise — we will ask additional verification questions before acting.

Where a refund request appears to be made by someone other than the account holder, we will not refund without first taking reasonable steps to confirm with the account holder. We may temporarily lock the account during verification to prevent further charges or further use.

7. Service Outages, Quality Problems, and Remediation

Where the Service is unavailable for a substantial portion of a billing period due to a fault on our side, our default remediation is a service credit applied to your next billing period rather than a cash refund. We choose service credit because it is faster to process and keeps your subscription continuous, but if you prefer cash you can ask for it instead and we will issue the cash equivalent unless that creates a payment-partner risk.

Quality complaints about the output of the Service — for example, you feel the editorial output is not what you expected — are not by themselves grounds for refund, because output quality depends on the input you provide and on the editorial choices you make in reviewing it. We are happy to look at specific issues and, where we have made a clear error, to apply a goodwill credit at our discretion. We encourage you to send concrete examples to support@shadowtext.ai so we can investigate.

Where you report a quality problem and we determine the cause was a transient defect on our side (for example, a misrouted request to a degraded provider), we will normally re-run the affected job at no additional cost in addition to or instead of any refund or credit.

8. Currency, Foreign-Exchange, and Tax Refunds

Refunds are issued in the same currency in which the original charge was processed. Where your bank or card issuer applied a foreign-exchange conversion to the original charge, you may receive back a slightly different amount in your local currency than you originally paid because of intervening exchange-rate movement and the issuer's foreign-exchange margin. We refund the original transaction amount; we cannot compensate for exchange-rate differences applied by your bank.

Where tax was added to the original charge and the refund is approved, the tax portion is refunded with the principal. Where the tax-collecting authority has already received the tax and our refund is partial, we refund the tax pro-rata to the principal portion being refunded.

If you provided a tax-exempt certificate or a VAT registration number after a charge was already processed, we cannot retroactively refund the tax for prior charges; the exemption applies only from the date we receive a valid certificate.

9. Chargebacks and Disputes

Please contact us before opening a chargeback or dispute with your bank or with Alipay. In most cases we can resolve issues faster and with less hassle than the dispute process.

Opening a chargeback without first giving us a reasonable opportunity to resolve the issue is a breach of our Terms of Service. Where we observe a pattern of chargeback abuse, we may refuse to provide the Service to you in the future, even on a new account.

10. Consumer Rights

Nothing in this Refund Policy limits any non-waivable consumer rights you have under the law of your country of residence. Consumers in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and other jurisdictions with mandatory consumer-protection laws may have additional rights, including a statutory withdrawal period for distance contracts. Where mandatory consumer law gives you a right that goes further than this Policy, that right applies.

If you start using the Service during a statutory withdrawal period, you may, depending on your jurisdiction, lose the right to withdraw without charge for the portion of the Service already supplied. We will tell you about this at checkout where it applies.

11. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Refund Policy from time to time. The current version is always available at https://shadowtext.ai/refund-policy. Material changes will be notified by email or in-product. Refund requests are evaluated against the version of this Policy in force on the date of the underlying charge.

12. Contact Us

Questions about refunds should be sent to shadowtext.ai at support@shadowtext.ai. We aim to respond within two business days.