Refund & Cancellation Policy

Every website is paid for in three stages. Knowing which stage you're in is the whole of this policy, so here they are:

1. 1. The generation fee — $25 (Pro) or $75 (Signature). Paid up front. It pays for the work of producing your website — the Pro versions that get generated for you, or the hand-built Signature first look.
2. 2. The build balance — $275 (Pro) or $425 (Signature). This is the rest of the $300 / $500 total, after your generation fee is credited. We invoice it after your website has been reviewed and approved — that is when the payment link reaches you. Your dashboard will also let you pay it early if you would rather; that is an option, never a requirement.
3. 3. Monthly support — $25/mo (Pro) or $50/mo (Signature). A recurring charge that starts only when the studio publishes your site, and only if the build balance has been paid. It never starts before that.

The generation fee buys the work of making your website exist — not a deposit held against something we might do later. Because of that:

• It becomes non-refundable once we've delivered. For Pro, that means once your generated website versions are in your dashboard for you to look at. For Signature, once your first look has been delivered. At that point the work is done and you have it.
• You keep every draft we produced. A Pro purchase includes up to three generated versions, and asking for a refund of the fee never removes them: the versions stay in your dashboard and their preview links keep working. We don't take back work you've already seen.
• It is refunded in full if we never deliver a preview. If something breaks on our side, or we simply can't produce a website for you, you get the whole fee back. You should not be out of pocket for work you never got to see.
• Not liking the result is a revision, not a refund. If what came back isn't right, tell us — revisions are part of the process and cost nothing extra. Ask before you give up on it.

We say a Signature first look usually arrives within 24 hours, and that Pro generation takes minutes. "Usually" is doing real work in that sentence — this is a one-person studio, and sometimes things take longer.

So here is the remedy, and it's the simple one: while we're late, you can cancel and get the whole fee back. Any time before we deliver, for any reason — including just being tired of waiting — email us and we refund the generation fee in full. You never have to argue about whether a delay was reasonable. If you haven't seen anything, you don't owe us anything.

To be straight about what this is not: there is no automatic late credit, no discount that applies itself, and no system that notices we're behind and pays you. The studio watches an overdue flag in its own console. The refund above is the promise you can actually hold us to, so it's the one we wrote down.

Once a website has been delivered, lateness stops being a refund question and becomes a revision question — tell us what's wrong and we fix it.

Refundable in full, any time before we publish your site. If you pay the balance and then change your mind — for any reason, or none — email us before the site goes live and we refund all of it.

This is deliberately the most generous part of the policy, because it's the largest payment and it's the one you make on trust. Two things are worth being precise about. We don't invoice the balance until your website has been reviewed and approved. And the monthly plan genuinely cannot start until the balance is paid — that one is enforced by our billing code, not by us remembering.

Your dashboard does let you pay the balance early, before there is anything to look at, if for some reason you want to. Nothing pushes you there. And if you do it, this refund promise still covers you in full — you can ask for all of it back right up until we publish.

Once your site is published, the build is delivered and the balance is no longer automatically refundable. If something has gone genuinely wrong at that point, email us anyway — we'd rather sort it out than have you sit there unhappy with a website you paid for.

Cancel whenever you want. Once the plan has started there are two ways: open your dashboard and use Manage billing, which takes you to Stripe's own billing portal, or just email pschlicht12@yahoo.com and ask us to cancel it. Emailing always works; if the Stripe portal isn't available to you for any reason, that's the fallback, and we'll do it for you.

Before we publish, cancelling is by email — that's the only way, and it works. The monthly plan doesn't exist yet at that point: nothing has been set up to charge you, so there is nothing in the Stripe portal to switch off, and the Manage billing button may not even appear in your dashboard. Email pschlicht12@yahoo.com and say you don't want the plan started. We won't start it, and we'll confirm that back to you in writing.

If you email us to cancel, it takes effect at the end of the billing period you've already paid for. You keep support for the rest of that month and are not charged again. That is how the studio does it, every time.

Stripe's billing portal is Stripe's, and it cancels on whatever terms that portal is configured with — which may not be the same thing. If you want the end-of-period behaviour guaranteed, email us instead. We would rather tell you that than let you find out afterwards.

There are no partial-month refunds. We never prorate. If you cancel on day 3 of a month, that month still runs to its end and is not refunded in part. This is a real limitation, not fine print we're hoping you skip: our billing simply does not do proration.

Cancelling never takes your website down. The support plan buys our availability for updates and changes — it is not rent on your site. Nothing in our system unpublishes a site, deletes a file, or touches your project history because a plan was cancelled, and that is written into the billing code on purpose.

The one honest caveat: hosting a site costs the studio money, so we do reserve the right — as a human decision, with notice to you first — to stop hosting a site whose plan has lapsed, or to remove files after that. Section 14 of the Terms sets out how much notice you get and how you get a copy of your files. We have never done it, and we would tell you long before we did.

If a monthly payment fails, we email you a link to pay it and we email ourselves too. We do not unpublish your website over a failed payment.

If we ever take a site offline, we stop billing for it. Suspending a site is a deliberate decision by the studio, not something that happens by itself. When it happens, the monthly plan is paused at the same time and the charges that would have been raised while you were offline are cancelled outright — not stored up and collected later. You don't pay a support fee for a month you spent suspended. Turning it back on is a manual step at our end, so if a suspension looks wrong to you, email us and we'll sort it out.

Honestly: by hand. There is no refund button in this app and no automatic refund logic anywhere in it. A refund is the studio issuing it through Stripe, one at a time. That's a one-person studio being straight with you about how it works, and it means every timeline below is a person's commitment rather than something a machine guarantees.

1. 1. Email us. pschlicht12@yahoo.com. Include the email address you paid with, and roughly what happened. You don't need a form or a reason code.
2. 2. We reply within [[REFUND TURNAROUND — N BUSINESS DAYS]] — and if it qualifies under this policy, we issue the refund through Stripe at the same time. If it doesn't qualify, you get a real answer explaining why, in the same window, not silence.
3. 3. The money goes back to the original payment method — the same card you paid with. We can't send it anywhere else. Once we've issued it, it typically reaches your statement in 5–10 business days. That last stretch belongs to your bank and the card network, not to us: we can tell you the exact date we issued the refund, and we can't make your bank post it faster.

Refunding a payment does not unpublish or delete your website, and neither does cancelling. If a refund is meant to end the project too, we'll say so explicitly in the email — it is never implied.

Tell us and we refund it. No conditions, no argument. If you cancelled — by email or through the Stripe portal — and a charge lands afterwards that shouldn't have, forward us the receipt or just tell us the date and we'll put it back. This is the one item on this page with no qualifying test attached to it, because a charge after a cancellation is our mistake, not a judgement call.

The same applies to anything else that looks wrong on your statement: charged twice, charged the wrong amount, charged for a month your site was offline. Email us the details. We'd much rather find it was our error and fix it than have you assume you're stuck with it.

You have every right to dispute a charge with your bank. We'd just ask you to email us first, because a direct refund is faster for you than a chargeback and we would rather fix the problem than argue about it. One person reads that inbox and will actually reply.

Signature projects are quoted individually and are not billed through the checkout on this site, so this policy doesn't govern them. The refund and cancellation terms for a Signature commission are whatever is agreed in writing with you before the project starts. If you're considering one, start at the custom project page and we'll put the terms in the proposal.

California law requires a seller to give buyers its legal name and street address alongside its refund policy, before taking payment. Here it is:

Payments are processed by Stripe. Card details are entered on Stripe's pages and are never seen or stored by this studio — what appears on your statement is a Stripe charge for ImagineSite.

If this policy changes, the version that applies to you is the one that was published when you paid. We won't retroactively make something less refundable than it was on the day you handed over money. The date at the top tells you which version you're looking at.