Refunds and cancellation policy

The short version #

This one document is both halves of it: the website refund policy, which governs the one-time charge, and the hosting cancellation policy, which governs the monthly. They get mixed up constantly, and they work differently. Today you pay $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting. After that hosting is $8.99 a month, billed on the same date each month until you cancel, and you can cancel in any month. There is no contract, no minimum term, no notice period and no fee for leaving. You are not buying a year and paying monthly; you are buying a month at a time. The $1 bought the website our team designs, writes and builds for you; the monthly is the web hosting that keeps it online, which every website needs from someone. Two companion documents finish the picture: the billing and subscription terms set out every charge before you make one, and the delivery and fulfillment policy says what you get and when.

The $1, before your site goes live #

Ask us to stop at any point between placing the order and the site being published, and we refund the $1 and the first month of hosting in full. You do not have to tell us why, and it makes no difference how much of the work we have already done.

Email [email protected] or say so on live chat. We will confirm in writing, refund it to the card you paid with, and delete the draft site and the questionnaire answers unless you would rather we kept them for a while in case you come back.

The same applies if we cannot take the work on, or if we cannot get hold of you and have to close the build under section 5 of the terms. If the site never went live, you never owe us the $1 or the first month.

The $1, after your site goes live #

The $1 is the price of the build, not a deposit on a subscription. A team designed the pages, wrote the copy, sourced the photographs, registered the domain and put the whole thing on the internet. That work has been delivered and cannot be handed back.

So from the moment your site is published, the $1 stays with us. You can still cancel the hosting the same day, and if you do, section 6 sets out exactly what happens. You keep the finished website itself: it is yours under section 13 of the terms, and the export in section 7 is how you take it with you.

Where you stand in law

There is no federal law giving a buyer a general right to change their mind about something bought online. The federal cooling-off rule covers sales made away from a seller’s place of business, at your door or at a temporary location, and it does not reach a website. Several states have cooling-off rules of their own, usually three business days, and they mostly attach to particular kinds of sale rather than to services ordered online. In summary, on the letter of the law a US buyer of this service may have no statutory cooling-off right at all.

So we give one anyway, and it is longer than any state would require. These are commitments, not a description of the law:

• Any time before your site is published, the $1 and the first month of hosting come back in full, to a business or a consumer alike, with no reason asked for and no deduction for the work already done. In practice that is the entire build, which is normally about a week.
• If your site happens to go live sooner than three business days after you ordered, you still get the $1 and the first month back in full if you ask within those three business days. The speed of our build is not allowed to cost you a cooling-off period.
• Neither of those depends on which state you live in, on whether you are buying as a consumer or as a business, or on you finding the right words. One line on chat or by email is enough.

The monthly hosting #

Hosting is paid monthly in advance, on the same date every month. When you cancel:

• the payment due next month is not taken, and there is nothing further to pay;
• the month you have already paid for is not refunded in whole or in part;
• your site stays online for every day of it, so you get what you paid for.

Cancel on day 2 of a month and you keep the site up for the remaining 28 days at no extra cost. Cancel on day 29 and you have had the month. Either way the total is the same and there is no penalty for choosing the moment badly.

If you are moving down a plan rather than leaving, the change takes effect at your next payment date so that you keep what you have already paid for. Moving up takes effect at once and is charged pro rata for the rest of the month. Moving from Complete down to Basic also moves your domain out of the monthly and onto its own line at cost, and we tell you that before the change goes through.

Exceptions, where we do refund a month, are in section 10.

How to cancel #

Three ways, all of them the same weight:

• in your dashboard, under billing, which takes about four clicks;
• on live chat, and ask for the confirmation in writing;
• by email to [email protected] from the address on the account.

We will not put you through a retention script, an offer you have to refuse three times, or a form that asks you to explain yourself. There is no save attempt of any kind between the cancel button and the confirmation, no discount to turn down and no survey to complete. Nothing has to be canceled by telephone, and nothing you started online has to be ended anywhere other than online. Canceling takes no more steps than signing up took. We confirm it by email the same business day, telling you the exact date your site comes down and the exact date your export expires. If that email does not arrive, the cancellation has not registered, so chase us.

Two of those sentences are there because different states require different parts of them and we would rather commit to all of it everywhere than work out which line applies to you. The full version, with the messages we send around a cancellation, is section 6 of the billing and subscription terms.

The billing side of this, including every message we send around a cancellation and what happens to the next payment, is set out in full in section 6 of the billing and subscription terms.

Nobody at DEVIQO will try to talk you out of it, because everything here is done in writing on live chat and by email. That is better for you anyway: you keep the record of what was agreed and when.

What happens, and when #

1. The day you cancel Nothing changes at all. Your site is up, your mailbox works, your store takes orders, and you can carry on editing. The only thing that happens is that no further payment will be taken.
2. Until the end of the paid month Everything runs exactly as it did, with the same backups, the same certificate and the same support. Change your mind in this period and there is nothing to undo: tell us and the plan simply continues.
3. The last day of the paid month The website comes offline and the mailbox stops accepting new mail. Visitors see a plain page saying the site is not currently available. Nothing is deleted on this day.
4. The 30 days after that Your export is ready to download, and you can still get into the dashboard to fetch it. Your domain can be transferred out at any point. Ask us to restart in this window and the whole site goes back exactly as it was, on the next month’s payment.
5. Day 30 The website content and the mailbox contents are deleted from the live system. After this point we cannot put the site back, and restarting means building a new one.
6. After that Your data leaves the nightly backups as they age out on their own: 30 days on Basic and 90 days on Complete. Your invoices are kept for as long as tax law requires, which is set out in the privacy policy. Everything else is gone.

We email you a reminder before the site comes down and again before the export expires, so the thirty days cannot slip past you while you are busy.

What is in your export #

Ask at any time, not only when you are leaving, and we produce it within two business days. It contains:

• every page as plain HTML, with the images and files it uses;
• the text of every page as a document, so a new designer can lift the copy straight out;
• your images at full size, including the ones we sourced and licensed for you;
• your products, with descriptions, prices and stock, as a spreadsheet;
• your orders and your inquiries, as spreadsheets;
• your bookings and your customer list, as spreadsheets;
• your mailbox, in a standard mail format any mail client can import;
• your DNS settings, so whoever takes over knows how it was configured.

What is not in it is our editor, our dashboard, our templates and our source code. Those stay ours under section 13 of the terms. The practical effect is that a new developer can rebuild your site from the export in an afternoon rather than starting from a blank page, but they will be putting it on their own platform.

There is no charge for an export, ever, and there is no charge for us to answer a question from whoever is taking over. If the reason you are leaving is that the site is not bringing work in, say so before you go: what a website redesign should fix is a fair test of whether the problem is the site, and a rebuild costs the same $1 as the first one did.

Your domain #

We do not hold domains hostage. Yours is registered with you as the registrant, which means it is legally yours whatever happens to your plan.

• To move the name to another registrar, we unlock it and send you the authorization code, normally within one business day. Neither the registry nor we charge you for the transfer itself, though your new registrar will charge you for the year it adds.
• Registry rules set one limit we cannot waive. A name registered or transferred in the last 60 days cannot move again yet. That is ICANN’s rule rather than ours, and it applies wherever the name is held.
• If you would rather point it somewhere else and leave it with us for now, tell us where and we will change the DNS.

While your plan runs we manage the DNS and handle the renewal for you as part of the service. The .com is included on the Complete plan at $18.99 a month. On Basic at $8.99 a month the name is registered in your own name and run for you, and the registry’s own annual fee for it, about $12 a year, is billed separately at cost. When the plan ends we stop handling the renewal, so from that point it is yours to arrange wherever the name is held. We will not renew it and invoice you, and we will not let it lapse without telling you: we write to you before the renewal date if the name is still with us.

If you already owned the domain before you came to us, none of this applies. It never left you. How names are registered and renewed here is set out on the domain names page, which also explains why the registrant field is the only part of a domain invoice worth arguing about.

If we end it instead #

If we decide to stop hosting your site for reasons of our own, we give you 30 days’ notice by email and refund any month you have paid for and not used, worked out to the day. You get the same export window and the same help moving your domain.

If we end it because of something serious you have done, such as a breach of the acceptable use policy, there is no refund of the month in progress, but you still get your export unless a court has told us otherwise or handing the material over would itself be unlawful.

When we refund a month anyway #

The rule in section 4 has exceptions, and we apply them without being argued into it:

• We took a payment after you canceled. Refunded in full, and we will apologize for it.
• We charged you twice for the same month. Refunded in full.
• We charged the wrong amount, or charged for a plan you had already moved off. We refund the difference.
• We ended your plan for our own convenience. Refunded pro rata, as in section 9.
• Your site never went live and the build was closed. Everything you have paid us comes back, including the $1.

Where we miss the uptime target, the remedy is the service credit in the service level document rather than a refund. It is applied to your next invoice and you do not have to have canceled to claim it.

How a refund is paid #

Always back to the card you paid with, through Stripe. We cannot send it anywhere else, and we will never ask you for bank details to process a refund. If anyone claiming to be from DEVIQO asks you for bank details, it is not us.

We start the refund within five business days of agreeing it and usually the same day. How long it then takes to appear is up to your bank, and three to five business days is normal. If your card has expired or been replaced since you paid, the money still finds its way to the account behind it in almost every case; if it comes back to us, we will contact you to sort it out.

We bill in USD and refund in USD, the same amount that was taken. If your card is settled in another currency by your own bank, its exchange rate on the day of the refund applies and a small difference either way is normal, which is not something either of us can control.

Chargebacks #

Please come to us before going to your bank. A chargeback takes weeks, costs us a fee whether or not it succeeds, and freezes your account while the card scheme investigates, which means your website goes down over an amount we would have refunded the same afternoon.

If you raise one anyway, we will defend it with the record of what was ordered and delivered, and we may suspend the service until it is resolved. If it turns out we were in the wrong, we will say so to the bank rather than fight it.

Coming back later #

Within the 30 day window, one message restarts everything exactly as it was, and the only thing you pay to restart is the next month’s hosting. Nothing has to be rebuilt.

After the 30 days, the content has gone and a new site means a new build. Whatever the current offer is at that time is what you will pay for it; we do not charge a returning customer more than a new one.

Your domain is unaffected either way, provided it is still registered to you and has not been allowed to expire.

If you are unhappy with any of this #

Tell us. Email [email protected] with “Complaint” in the subject and it goes through the process in section 21 of the terms: acknowledged within one business day, answered properly within ten, and reviewed by a director if the first answer does not satisfy you.

Nothing in this policy takes away a right your state’s law gives you, and nothing in it is a condition of getting your money back. If our answer does not satisfy you, you can take it to your state attorney general, to the Federal Trade Commission, or to court, and none of those routes is closed off anywhere in our documents. Section 23 of the terms of service is written so that they stay open: your own state’s law, your own state’s courts, no arbitration clause, no class action waiver and no jury trial waiver. You can also use your state’s small claims court, which for a dispute the size of a monthly hosting bill is usually the sensible one.

Complaining does not change your service, your price, the speed of your support or the answer you get. We would rather hear it from you than read it in a regulator’s letter, but that is our preference and not a condition.

Common questions about the refunds and cancellation policy #

Most people read this page before they order rather than after, which is the right way round. These are the six things they ask.