Refund and cancellation policy
This is the policy that will govern the first paid Founding plan, published before the first charge rather than after it. It is a real policy, not a placeholder page: the window, the cancellation rule and the request route below are commitments.
Last updated 2026-08-18, for v0.0.0.
This policy is written against the Founding plans as they are actually being considered on the pricing page — which is to say: proposed, unpriced, and not purchasable. The billing interval is the one term below that cannot be stated concretely yet, and it is marked where it appears rather than guessed.
Start here: nothing is for sale, so nothing has been charged
The Alpha is free and invite-gated. There is no checkout on this site, no price is published on the pricing page, and no payment can currently be taken at all — payment processing is not live.
The consequences are worth spelling out, because a refund policy that skips them is the kind of generic template a reader cannot assess:
- No money has ever been collected for Ophiuchus. Not in a trial, not in a pilot, not as a deposit or a pre-order.
- There is no refund to request today, because there is no charge to refund.
- No card details have ever been handled, by this site or by the Alpha. The site is static files and the Alpha is a command-line tool; neither has a payment form.
- Saying you would pay is not paying. The pricing page invites you to say what a founding plan is worth to you through the Alpha access channel. That is an expression of interest with no charge attached, nothing to cancel, and nothing to refund.
Everything below takes effect the moment a paid plan opens, and applies to the first charge onward.
What is being sold, when it is sold
The two Founding plans under consideration — Founding Developer and Founding Team — are described on the pricing page. What is being bought in each case is access to the Ophiuchus Alpha software, delivered digitally: an invite to a private repository plus the licence to run the command-line tool on your own machine. There is no physical goods component, no shipping, and no hosted service behind it.
Both plans are proposed as recurring subscriptions billed every
BILLING_INTERVAL_TBD. Neither has a published price.
BILLING_INTERVAL_TBD is a placeholder, not a valueThe billing interval has not been decided and published. BILLING_INTERVAL_TBD
is a placeholder token, and it is deliberately not a guess — a policy that
promises "a full refund within your first month" while the plan turns out to bill
annually is a policy that misdescribes what a customer bought.
The interval is set once, on the pricing page, alongside the price. When it is, the words "one billing period" throughout this page mean that interval, and this admonition is removed.
Refunds
A full refund, on request, within 14 days of the charge. No reason is needed and none will be asked for. This applies to a first charge and to every renewal charge, so a renewal you did not want or notice is refundable on the same terms.
The 14 days run from the date of the charge, not from when you first used the Alpha or from when access was granted.
What you get back is the full amount you were charged. Any fee the payment processor keeps on a refund is ours to absorb, not yours — it will not be deducted from what you are refunded.
After 14 days, a charge is not automatically refundable. Ask anyway if something went wrong: the Alpha is an experiment and it can break in ways that are our fault rather than yours, and we would rather refund you than argue about a date.
There is no restocking fee, no partial-refund schedule, and no requirement to justify a request. Requesting a refund does not by itself end your access — see cancellation, which is separate.
Cancellation
Cancel at any time, and the cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. You keep access until that period ends, and you are not charged again after it. Cancelling does not retroactively refund the period you are already in — if you want that period back, request a refund within the 14 days above instead, or as well.
Cancellation is by asking, through the contact route below.
There is no account system, no billing portal and no hosted application — the
sign-in page says so plainly, and the terms list all three as
things v0.0.0 does not provide. So there is no button you can press yourself to
cancel. You have to send a request, and a human has to act on it.
This is disclosed rather than dressed up. A cancellation you cannot perform without another person's cooperation is a worse experience than one you can, and it is the honest state of an Alpha with no accounts.
If your Alpha access is withdrawn by us while you are inside a period you have paid for, the unused part of that period is refunded without you having to ask. The terms explain that access can be withdrawn; being cut off is not a reason to keep your money.
How to request either one
Both a refund and a cancellation go through the same route: the channel used to request Alpha access. That channel is recorded in exactly one place, on the quickstart, so that it cannot drift out of sync between pages.
Include the receipt or confirmation the checkout sent you. Because there is no account system, that receipt is what identifies your purchase — there is no customer record to look you up in.
Say which you want, a refund or a cancellation or both, since they are separate things and one does not imply the other.
There is no support commitment for the Alpha — no response-time target, no support hours, no ticket queue. The terms say the same. A refund request will be acted on by a person when they see it, and that is the whole of the commitment.
The contact address is not repeated on this page — it is held in exactly one place, on the quickstart, so it cannot drift out of sync between pages.
Who processes the payment, and who issues the refund
When a paid plan opens, the checkout will be hosted by a third-party merchant of
record — PAYMENT_PROVIDER_TBD — which means that company is the seller of record
for the transaction, handles the card details, and is the party that issues the
refund to your card once we approve it.
PAYMENT_PROVIDER_TBD is a placeholder, and no merchant account is liveA provider has been chosen internally, but no merchant account has completed verification and no live payment can be processed today. Naming a merchant of record on a public policy page before that relationship exists would be a claim that cannot currently be honoured, so the name is held as a placeholder and filled in once, here, when the account is live.
What does not depend on the placeholder: card details never reach this site or the Alpha, and the refund window and cancellation rule above are ours and do not change with the provider.
Nothing above limits any statutory right you may have. If the law that applies to you gives you a longer cancellation period or a stronger refund right than this page does, that law wins — and note that which law applies is itself unresolved.
Disputes and chargebacks
If you think a charge is wrong, ask for a refund first. It is faster than a chargeback, it costs you nothing, and within 14 days the answer is yes without a discussion.
Raising a chargeback instead is your right and it will not be contested out of spite. It does cost us a fixed fee whichever way it is decided, which is why asking first is genuinely the better route for both sides.
Changes to this policy
This policy can change during the Alpha, and the last-updated date at the top changes with it. The terms that applied on the date you were charged are the ones that govern that charge — a later, less generous version of this page does not reach backward.
The terms of service cover everything else about using the Alpha, including what it does not promise. Privacy and safe use covers what the Alpha does and does not protect.