Refund and Cancellation Policy

Effective date: 4 September 2026 Last revised: 4 September 2026

This policy is part of the Terms of Service. Where it describes what the product does, it describes what the code actually does — every statement here was checked against the implementation, and the file-and-line evidence is in docs/release/commercial-legal-audit.md.

The short version

1. Plans and how you are charged

CourseLite has a Free plan and three paid plans: Study, Pro and Max.

• The price you pay is the one Stripe shows you on its checkout page at the moment you subscribe. Prices are read live from Stripe rather than typed into the app.
• You choose the billing interval at checkout — monthly, or annual where annual is offered.
• Your subscription renews automatically at that interval, at that price, using your saved payment method, until you cancel.
• You are authorising a recurring charge. There is no separate confirmation before each renewal.

All payments are handled by Stripe. Checkout happens on Stripe's own hosted page. Card management, invoices and receipts happen in Stripe's own Customer Portal. CourseLite never sees, receives or stores your card number, expiry date, security code or billing address. What we store is a Stripe customer identifier, a subscription identifier, which plan you are on, its status, and when the current period ends.

Taxes may be added where the law requires.

On tax, plainly. CourseLite has no tax configuration of its own: no sales tax, VAT or GST is calculated, added or collected by anything we run. If that changes, the amount will be shown to you at checkout before you are charged, and this section will say so.

1.1 Free trials

We do not currently offer a free trial. There is no trial logic in the product.

If we ever offer one, we will show its terms before you start it — how long it lasts, what happens at the end, and whether it becomes a paid subscription automatically — and you will be able to cancel before you are charged.

1.2 Promotional codes

Stripe's checkout page accepts promotional codes. A code applies only as Stripe applies it, is subject to whatever conditions we published with it, has no cash value, cannot be exchanged for money, and can expire or be withdrawn. Using a code does not change anything else in this policy.

2. How to cancel

Two routes, and both work:

1. In CourseLite. Settings → Subscription → Cancel subscription. We ask one question — why you are leaving — and then cancel. There is no discount offer, no "are you sure" second screen, and no pause-instead detour. One screen, one question, and the cancel button is the main thing on it.
2. In the Stripe Customer Portal. Settings → Manage payments opens Stripe's own portal, where you can also cancel, change your card, change your plan and download invoices. This route asks you nothing.

One honest caveat about the second route. Cancelling from the Stripe portal works only if cancellation is enabled in Stripe's own portal configuration, which is a setting in Stripe's dashboard rather than anything in our code. Route 1 — Settings → Cancel subscription — is ours and always works. If route 2 does not, that is why, and the line below is the answer.

You can always cancel. If neither route works for you for any reason, email support@courselite.org and we will cancel it for you.

3. What cancelling actually does

Cancelling schedules the end of your subscription. It does not end it immediately.

Precisely:

• Your plan stays active until the end of the period you have already paid for.
• On that date, the subscription ends and your account moves to the Free plan.
• You are not charged again. Cancelling stops the next renewal.
• Your settings page shows the exact date, labelled "Cancels" rather than "Renews", so you can see what you still have.

We do this rather than cutting you off at the moment you click, because you paid for the period and taking it back would be charging you for time we did not deliver.

3.1 Nothing of yours is deleted

Cancelling deletes nothing. Your courses, documents, notebooks, flashcards, practice tests, drafts and Google files all stay exactly where they are. You keep reading them, exporting them and deleting them on the Free plan.

What changes is what you can create. If you are over a Free-plan ceiling — more notebooks than Free allows, say — you keep everything you have and cannot make a new one until you are back under that ceiling. Nothing is deleted to make you fit.

Deleting your account is a separate action, described in Section 7.

3.2 You can change your mind

Any time before the end date, press the Keep button in settings — it is labelled with your plan, so Keep Study, Keep Pro or Keep Max — and the cancellation is undone. You keep the same subscription and the same billing date — you do not buy the plan again, and you are not charged early.

We keep the reason you gave when you cancelled, even if you come back. You did cancel, and what you said about why is still useful to us.

4. Changing plans

Upgrading and downgrading happen in the Stripe Customer Portal (Settings → Manage payments), or by choosing a different plan from the pricing page.

Stripe calculates any credit or additional charge for a mid-period plan change — this is called proration. CourseLite does not calculate it and does not override it. What you are charged on a plan change is whatever Stripe's own proration produces under our portal configuration.

Why this policy does not print a formula. The exact proration behaviour is a setting in Stripe's dashboard, not in our code, and Stripe shows you the amount before you confirm a plan change. We would rather send you to the number Stripe is actually going to charge than describe one here that could drift out of step with it.

5. Refunds

5.1 We do not refund automatically

No charge is refunded automatically, and cancelling does not produce a refund. There is no automatic refund in the product — cancelling stops the next charge, and you keep the plan for the rest of the period you already paid for, which is what you paid for.

We are telling you this plainly rather than hiding it, because "cancel anytime" sometimes reads as "cancel and get your money back", and here it does not.

5.2 You can ask, and we will answer

Refund requests are considered individually.

Email support@courselite.org with your account's email address, roughly when the charge happened, and what went wrong. We will look at your particular situation and reply.

This is a commitment to read every request and give you a real answer — not a polite way of saying no, and not a queue that goes nowhere. We will not ignore you and we will not answer with a link back to this page.

Some things we would expect to put right:

• you were charged twice for the same period;
• you were charged after you cancelled;
• a technical failure on our side meant you could not use what you paid for;
• you were charged after asking us to delete your account;
• you were charged at the wrong price, or in the wrong currency; or
• somebody used your card without your permission.

Some things make a refund less likely, and we would rather say so than let you find out by asking:

• you used the plan for the period and changed your mind afterwards;
• you forgot to cancel before a renewal you did not want — though tell us, because we would rather sort out an honest mistake than argue about it; or
• your school did not accept work CourseLite produced. That is covered by the Academic Integrity Policy, and it is not a product fault.

We do not publish a fixed refund window. We would rather look at what actually happened than apply a rule that is wrong half the time. If you think a charge was unfair, ask.

5.3 How a refund is paid

If we agree to a refund, we issue it through Stripe, back to the original payment method. Stripe and your bank decide how long it takes to appear — typically five to ten business days, and not something we control.

We may refund all or part of a charge depending on the circumstances.

5.4 Your statutory rights

Nothing in this policy takes away a right you have under a consumer-protection law that applies to you. Where a law gives you a right to cancel, withdraw or be refunded, that law wins over this policy and we will honour it.

On the EU and UK 14-day right of withdrawal. CourseLite is sold in the United States and is not offered in the EEA or the UK, so that regime does not apply to a purchase made here. It is a different regime from the case-by-case approach above — it also requires a waiver to be collected at checkout, not asserted in a policy — and we would have to build that step and rewrite this section before selling into those markets.

5.5 Chargebacks

If something is wrong with a charge, please contact us first. We can usually fix it faster than a bank can.

Raising a chargeback without contacting us may cause your account to be suspended while the dispute is open, because Stripe restricts the account automatically. We will still talk to you.

6. If a payment fails

If a renewal payment fails, Stripe will retry it over the following days.

• You keep your plan while Stripe retries. CourseLite does not lock you out the moment a card is declined. Your settings page shows a notice and a button to update your card in Stripe.
• If the payment is eventually recovered, nothing changes.
• If it is never recovered, the subscription ends and your account moves to the Free plan. As with any move to Free, nothing you have made is deleted.

Why this policy does not name a number of days. How many times and for how long Stripe retries a failed payment are settings in Stripe's dashboard rather than in our code, and Stripe emails you directly while it is retrying. Naming a number here that Stripe's configuration did not agree with would be worse than naming none.

7. Deleting your account

Deleting your account is different from cancelling, and it is permanent.

Deleting your account cancels your subscription first. If you have a live paid subscription, we tell Stripe to cancel it before we delete anything, and that cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for — exactly as if you had pressed Cancel. You are not charged again.

Your account itself goes straight away. That is the part worth reading twice: the subscription runs to the end of the period, but you cannot sign in to use it, because there is no longer an account to sign in to. The remaining time is not refunded automatically. If you would rather keep your work until the period runs out, cancel now and delete later — cancelling deletes nothing.

If a payment of yours has already failed and Stripe is still trying to collect it, we cancel the subscription outright instead of scheduling it, so that a retry cannot charge you after you have asked us to delete your account.

If we cannot reach Stripe at that moment, the deletion is refused and we tell you why — we will not delete your account and leave a subscription charging you for a product you can no longer open. If that happens, try again, or cancel in the Stripe Customer Portal first and then delete.

Deleting your account removes your courses, documents, notebooks, flashcards, practice tests, drafts and settings. What survives, and for how long, is set out in the Privacy Policy.

Deleting your account does not by itself entitle you to a refund of the current period. You can ask under Section 5.

8. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. If we make a material change, we will tell you before it takes effect. A change never applies retroactively to a charge already made. The version in force is the one with the effective date at the top.

9. Contact

CourseLite is an online service with no public office, so there is no postal address to write to. Email is the route for everything above.

Please include the email address on your account. Please do not send us your card number — we cannot use it and we do not want it.