Refund Policy

1Chat is a digital service delivered immediately. This policy sets out when and how you can request a refund. It applies alongside the South African Consumer Protection Act, which is not limited by anything stated below.

New paid subscriptions include a 14-day cooling-off period during which you may cancel and receive a full refund, provided no paid credits have been consumed in that period. Free-tier usage does not affect this right.

Once paid credits are used — even once — the subscription is considered “used” and the cooling-off refund no longer applies. You may still cancel to prevent renewal.

If the Service is materially unavailable for a continuous period of more than 24 hours within a single billing cycle and you are on a paid tier, you may request a pro-rata credit or refund equal to the affected portion of your subscription. Requests must be made within 30 days of the outage via our contact form. Outages caused by third-party AI providers, payment providers or your own internet connection are not covered as platform outages but will be considered in good faith.

Credits that have been consumed to generate chat responses or images are non-refundable. This applies whether they came from a monthly subscription allocation or a purchased top-up pack, and whether the Output was useful to you or not.

Top-up packs are refundable only if no credits from the pack have been consumed and the refund is requested within 14 days of purchase. Once any credit from a pack has been used, the entire pack becomes non-refundable.

When you cancel a subscription, you retain access until the end of the current billing period. We do not refund partial months. Any unused credits expire at the point of cancellation (see the Credits section of the Terms of Service).

If you believe a charge is incorrect, please contact us first — we can almost always resolve it faster than a chargeback. Fraudulent or abusive chargebacks (disputing a charge after clearly using the Service) may result in the account being suspended and any recovered amount being re-debited plus a reasonable administration fee. Legitimate chargeback rights under your card scheme rules are not affected.

Reach us via our contact form with:

• the email address on your account,
• the date and amount of the charge,
• a short description of why you are requesting a refund.

We respond within 5 business days. Approved refunds are returned to the original payment method and typically appear within 5 to 10 business days depending on your bank.