# Refund Policy > How subscription billing and cancellation work, when we refund, and how to ask for one if something went wrong. Source: https://hyperjobs.io/legal/refund This page explains how billing works, what cancelling does, and when you get money back. The short version: subscriptions are paid in advance, cancelling stops the next charge rather than refunding the current one, and if something went genuinely wrong we will sort it out. ## How billing works Paid plans are subscriptions, billed **in advance** through Stripe for the billing period you selected at checkout. Paying buys you that period's quota and rate limit — see [Pricing](/pricing) for the numbers. Subscriptions renew automatically at the then-current price until you cancel. Where a plan is offered on yearly billing, the yearly price is ten times the monthly price, so two months are free. You are charged by Stripe. We never see or hold your card details. ## Cancelling Cancel through the **Stripe customer portal**, which you reach from the "Manage billing / invoices" button on your settings page. The same portal holds your invoices and payment methods. Cancellation takes effect **at the end of the period you have already paid for**. You keep full access until then — your keys keep working, your quota stays where it is, nothing is cut off early. When the period ends, the subscription stops and your account drops to the Free plan. Cancelling is not a refund request, and it does not trigger one. It stops the next charge. You paid for a period; you get that period. There is no cancellation fee and no notice period. Cancel five minutes after paying and you still have the full month you bought. ## The default: no partial-period refunds We do not refund unused time in a period that has started. If you cancel on day 20 of a month, we do not refund the remaining ten days — you keep the service for those ten days instead. We also do not refund **quota you have already consumed**. Requests you made are requests we served, and the quota does not carry over to the next period either. Quotas reset on the first of each calendar month; unused requests expire. That is the default. The rest of this page is the exceptions to it, and they are real. ## If you are a consumer in the EU Most HyperJobs customers are businesses buying a developer tool, and a business buyer has **no statutory right of withdrawal**. The 14-day cooling-off right in the Consumer Rights Directive applies to **consumers** — people buying outside their trade, business, craft, or profession. If you bought this to put in a product or use at work, that is not you, and the rules below do not give you a right you would otherwise have. If you *are* a consumer, you have the right to withdraw from the contract within **14 days**, without giving a reason. There is a catch, and it is the standard one for digital services. The API works the moment you pay. Under Article 16(m) of the Consumer Rights Directive, you lose the right of withdrawal for a digital service once the service has been fully supplied, provided you gave prior express consent to performance starting during the withdrawal period and acknowledged that you would lose the right. By buying a plan and using the API before the 14 days are up, that is what you are doing. In practice: - **You bought, and have not called the API.** Within 14 days, ask and we refund in full. Nothing was supplied. - **You bought and started using it.** You have consented to immediate performance. If you withdraw within 14 days, you pay a proportionate amount for what you used and we refund the rest. - **After 14 days.** The statutory right has expired. The discretionary refunds below still apply. To withdraw, email . You do not need a form or a reason. Say you are withdrawing. Nothing on this page limits a consumer's statutory rights under the mandatory law of their own country. ## When we refund anyway Beyond anything the law requires, we refund at our discretion when the charge was not fair. Ask, and expect a straight answer rather than a script: Charged twice for the same period, or two subscriptions running where you meant to have one. Refunded in full, every time. This is our mistake, not a judgement call. A sustained outage or a defect that meaningfully stopped you using what you paid for. Tell us roughly when, and what you saw. We check it against our own records — and if the service was down, we do not need convincing. You paid, never made a request, and noticed later — a renewal you forgot, a plan bought for a project that never started. If the quota is untouched, we will refund it. `api_usage_daily` tells us whether it was used, so this is a matter of fact rather than argument. If a cancellation did not take and you were billed again, that is a bug in our billing, and it gets refunded in full. Bought the wrong tier and told us quickly, before leaning on the higher limits? We will fix it. Get in touch — do not just cancel and hope. What we generally do not refund: a month you used and then decided you did not need; quota you spent; a plan you outgrew; or a period you forgot to cancel but did use. In those cases cancelling stops the next charge, which is the lever that exists. ## How to ask Email . Include: - The **email address on the account**. - **Which charge** — the date, the amount, or the invoice number from the Stripe customer portal. - **What happened.** One or two sentences. You do not need to write a case. We answer refund requests within **5 business days**, usually sooner. If we approve it, the refund goes back through Stripe to the original payment method — we cannot send it anywhere else. Stripe typically takes **5 to 10 business days** to land it, and that part is your bank's timetable, not ours. The money leaves us immediately. A refunded subscription is cancelled: your account drops to the **Free** plan and its limits when the refund is processed, not at the end of the period. You are being given the money back for the period, so the period ends. ## Downgrades Moving to a cheaper plan is not a refund and does not produce one. We do not refund the price difference for the period you are in. If you downgrade through the Stripe customer portal, the change takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for. You keep the limits you paid for until then, and the cheaper price starts at the next renewal. If instead you buy a different plan through checkout, that starts a new subscription immediately and replaces the old one — the new plan's quota applies from that moment. If you are unsure which of the two you want, before clicking, and we will tell you which one does what you mean. ## Free plan The Free plan costs nothing, so there is nothing to refund. It has 500 requests a month and a 10 req/min rate limit, and you can stay on it indefinitely. If you run out, you wait for the reset or upgrade. ## Chargebacks If something is wrong, email us first. We would rather refund you in a day than argue with your bank for a month, and we usually can. Raising a chargeback instead means Stripe locks the disputed funds and the process moves out of our hands. We may suspend the account while a dispute is open — not as punishment, but because the subscription is no longer paid for while the money is held. A resolved dispute in your favour has the same effect as a refund: the account moves to the Free plan. ## Price changes If we raise the price of your plan, we will give you at least **30 days' notice** before it takes effect at your next renewal. Cancel before then and you never pay the new price. We do not change the price of a period you have already paid for. ## Questions Billing and refunds: . Anything technical about what your plan actually does: . The [Terms of Service](/legal/terms) cover fees, taxes, and renewal in full.