Refund and cancellation policy
1. The short version
Development work is billed by stages and refunds follow the stages: you never pay for work that has not started. Monthly services (SEO, advertising management, support) can be cancelled with 14 days' notice and are refundable for the unused prepaid period when we are at fault. Deposits for stages already in progress are refundable minus the fair value of work performed.
2. Stage-based development refunds
Fixed-price projects are split into stages with separate payments. If you cancel before a stage starts, that stage's payment is refunded in full or never charged. If you cancel mid-stage, we itemise the work performed — hours and deliverables — and refund the remainder of that stage's payment. Approved deliverables (for example, a prototype you signed off) are considered delivered and are not refundable; you keep the materials and may continue them with another team.
3. Monthly services
SEO, advertising management and support plans renew monthly. Cancel with 14 days' written notice via our qTox channel; the service runs until the end of the paid period and does not renew. Because promotion work is front-loaded into each month (audits, releases, optimizations), partial months are normally not refunded — but if we failed to deliver the agreed scope of a month, we refund that month in full or redo the work, your choice.
4. The first-month guarantee for promotion
If after the first full month of SEO or advertising management you can point to agreed deliverables that were not produced — the audit, the campaigns, the tracking, the report — and we cannot fix it within a week of your notice, the first month is refunded in full. This guarantee covers our performance, not market outcomes: no honest studio can guarantee positions or lead counts, and we do not pretend to.
5. What is not refundable
Completed and approved stages; third-party costs already incurred on your behalf (ad spend, stock licences, paid fonts, hosting fees paid to providers); rush fees for expedited work already delivered; and months of monthly services where the agreed scope was delivered. Where a third-party cost is refundable by the provider, we refund it to you as soon as we receive it.
6. How to request a refund
- Message us on qTox (ID on the Contact page), referencing the invoice or project name.
- State what you are asking for and why — a sentence is enough.
- We confirm receipt within one business day and decide within five, with a written explanation either way.
- Approved refunds are issued to the original payment method within 10 business days; you receive a confirmation with the processor reference.
7. Worked examples
Example 1. A client cancels a corporate site after approving the prototype but before design starts. The prototype stage (40%) is earned and kept; the remaining payments are never charged. The client keeps the prototype files.
Example 2. Mid-design, the client's priorities change and the project stops. We itemise design work performed, bill it against the design-stage payment, and refund the remainder within ten business days.
Example 3. An SEO month's agreed deliverables — audit fixes and two optimised pages — do not ship. The client notifies us, we fail to cure within a week, and the month is refunded in full under the guarantee.
Example 4. A support plan is cancelled on day 20 of a paid month. The plan runs to day 30 and does not renew; the partial month is not refunded because standby availability was provided all month.
8. Disputes and chargebacks
If you believe a refund was wrongly declined, reply to the decision email and a manager not involved in the original decision reviews the case within five business days. Please contact us before initiating a chargeback: an unexplained chargeback freezes the payment relationship and slows everything down, while a refund request starts a clock. Legitimate chargebacks, where we genuinely failed to resolve your issue, will not be contested.
9. Taxes, currency and processing
Refunds are issued in US dollars to the original payment method. Where taxes were charged, the refund includes them and a corrected invoice is issued. Bank conversion differences on non-USD cards belong to your bank's rates, not to us. Refunds are never sent to unrelated third-party accounts — this protects you against fraud.
10. Records
Every refund decision is logged with the project reference, reason and outcome, and reviewed quarterly. If a service repeatedly generates refunds, we treat that as a product problem to fix, not a statistic to hide. You may request the history of decisions on your own account at any time.
10a. More worked examples
Example 5. A landing page is delivered, approved and launched; two months later the client decides the business direction changed. Delivered work is not refundable — the warranty covers defects, not changed strategy — but the remaining support months are cancelled with standard notice.
Example 6. A store project stalls because the client cannot provide product data for six weeks. Stage payments already made are not lost: the project is paused, and work resumes when materials arrive. If the pause exceeds six months, either side may close the project with the current stage treated as mid-stage cancellation under section 2.
10b. Escalation
Refund decisions go through two levels: the project lead answers first, and any disagreement is reviewed by a manager who was not involved in the project. Beyond that, the dispute provisions of the terms of service apply. We keep the tone of this process deliberately boring: facts, invoices, timelines. Money arguments are resolved by documents, not by who writes the longer email.
10c. Pausing instead of cancelling
Monthly services can be paused once per year for up to two months instead of cancelled — useful for seasonal businesses. A paused service bills nothing, keeps its history and configuration, and resumes on your email. Pausing is not a refund mechanism: the months already paid ran their course. It simply avoids the cancellation-and-restart dance for a break you planned anyway.
10d. Scope of this policy
This policy covers services sold directly by VisionPixel LLC through this site or a written quote. Third-party costs (ad budgets, hosting, licences) are governed by those providers' own refund terms; where a provider refunds us, we pass it through in full. Work sold through marketplaces or partners follows the terms of that channel, which may be stricter than this policy — in that case the stricter rule applies to you.
10e. Partial delivery on cancelled stages
When a stage is cancelled mid-way, you receive the partial work produced up to that point together with the itemised account of hours. Partial deliverables are yours to keep and reuse — drafts, prototypes, partial code. We believe work you paid for belongs to you even when the project ends early; withholding drafts to pressure a client is not how we operate.
10f. Annual prepayments
Where a monthly service is prepaid annually at a discount, cancellation works the same way — 14 days' notice — and the unused full months of the prepaid period are refunded pro rata at the discounted rate. The current partial month is not refunded, consistent with section 3. The discount is not clawed back: you keep the benefit of the months you actually used.
10g. Goodwill cases
Not every situation fits a rule. Where a client hits genuine hardship — a business closing, a personal emergency — we have historically been flexible beyond this policy: pausing without counting the annual pause, splitting refunds, transferring remaining value to a successor project. Ask. The policy is the floor of what you can expect, not the ceiling of what is possible.
11. Timeframes at a glance
| Step | Timeframe |
|---|---|
| Receipt confirmation of your request | 1 business day |
| Decision on the request | 5 business days |
| Refund to the original payment method | 10 business days from decision |
| Cancellation of monthly services | 14 days' notice, effective end of paid period |
| First-month guarantee claim window | First full month + 7 days to cure |
12. Service credits as an alternative
For service shortfalls that do not qualify for a refund — for example, a monthly report delivered late — we may offer a credit against future invoices instead of a cash refund. Credits are optional: you can always ask for the refund review instead. Credits appear on the next invoice with a clear label so your accounting can reconcile them without contacting us.
13. If the refund itself goes wrong
Occasionally an approved refund does not land — expired cards, closed accounts, bank processing issues. If ten business days pass with nothing received, reply to the refund confirmation. We trace the payment with the processor, and where the original method cannot accept funds we agree an alternative, typically a transfer to the account that made the payment on proof of ownership.