Refund Policy

If the service does not meet your expectations on a paid plan, email [email protected] within seven (7) days of your first paid charge and, subject to the conditions below, we will refund that first payment in full. The refund is processed back to the original payment method within 5–10 business days, depending on your bank.

The window applies only to the very first paid subscription on a Penshift account. It does not apply to renewals, plan switches (Pro to Studio, monthly to annual, Student to Pro, etc.), top-ups, or any subsequent payment after the first has been kept past seven days.

The 7-day window is a chance to evaluate the service, not a free week of access. Where the account's activity within those seven days indicates that the product has been used in good faith — for example, recurring rewrite or detector activity across multiple sessions, scanning of substantial documents, or any pattern from which we can reasonably infer that the user has obtained the benefit of the service — we may decline the refund.

We reserve sole discretion to decide where the line falls between “trying the product” and “consuming the product.” Refund decisions are made case by case; this policy does not establish a numeric threshold for either side.

You can cancel at any time from your account or through the customer portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period — you keep access to all paid features until that date. We do not pro-rate partial months or partial years. After the period ends, your account drops to the Free tier; your data, settings, and account history remain intact.

All payments after the first are non-refundable, including monthly renewals, annual renewals, and any payments arising from a plan switch. If we charge an annual renewal, you may cancel to prevent the next renewal but you cannot recover the renewal payment that has already been taken. The same applies to monthly renewals. Cancel before the renewal date if you do not want the next payment to be charged.

In addition to active-use cases, we may decline a refund where we have reasonable evidence of abuse, including:

• Subscribing, processing large volumes near the daily cap, then requesting a refund within the same window;
• Repeatedly subscribing and refunding to circumvent free-tier limits or to obtain paid-tier output without paying;
• Creating multiple Penshift accounts in order to claim a “first payment” refund on each, with the same person, the same payment method, the same household, or the same device fingerprint behind them;
• Sharing one paid account with people who would otherwise have to subscribe themselves, then refunding before the period ends;
• Refund requests that follow a single concentrated burst of usage, especially where the burst consumes the majority of the period's caps in one or two sessions;
• Requests where the rewrite, detector, or plagiarism output has clearly been exported, published, submitted, or used downstream — the value has already been extracted from the service;
• Coordinating refunds across linked accounts (referrer + referred friend, business + employees) to launder the refund right;
• Card-testing patterns — small purchases on multiple cards to validate stolen payment methods, followed by refund requests;
• Refund requests on a Student-plan subscription where the student-verification email turns out to be inactive, alumni-only, or otherwise not associated with a current enrolment;
• Chargebacks filed without first contacting us — we always prefer to resolve issues directly. Reversed payments and chargebacks following abusive activity remain a debt owed to Penshift LTD and may be referred to collections;
• Requests outside the seven-day window or on a payment that is not the first paid charge on the account.

If we decline a refund, we'll tell you why in writing and, where appropriate, offer alternative resolution (a credit, a cap top-up, or a different plan).

We may, entirely at our discretion, issue a refund or credit outside this policy where there has been a genuine billing error (such as a duplicated charge), where the service has materially failed (such as an outage of more than one full business day), or where applicable consumer law in your country of residence gives you a non-waivable right to a remedy. UK and EU consumers retain their statutory rights, which this policy does not limit. Granting one such exception does not establish a precedent or create a right to similar treatment in other cases.

If a renewal payment fails, we'll email you and retry the charge a few times over the following days. If we still cannot process the payment, your plan reverts to Free. Re-subscribing later is a new first paid charge for the purposes of this policy and resets the 7-day window from the new payment date.

Refund requests and billing questions: [email protected]. Include the email address on your account, the approximate date of the payment you would like refunded, and a brief reason. We respond within five business days.