Refund policy

This policy applies to every commercial engagement with Nutshell Bytes: fixed-scope projects, monthly retainers, support plans, consulting blocks, audits, and any one-off deliverable purchased directly from us.

It does not apply to software, hosting, licences, or subscriptions you buy directly from a third party, even when we recommended or configured them on your behalf. Those are governed by the vendor terms you accepted at purchase.

Understanding the refund position starts with understanding the invoice. Fixed-scope projects are billed as a deposit followed by milestone payments tied to defined deliverables. Retainers are billed monthly in advance against a reserved block of capacity. Consulting and audit work is billed either as a flat fee or against an agreed number of hours.

In each case the money is attached to something specific: a reserved slot in the schedule, a completed milestone, or hours actually worked. Refund eligibility follows that same attachment.

A deposit reserves capacity in our delivery schedule and funds the discovery phase: requirements gathering, technical review, architecture decisions, and scope definition. Once we hold a slot for you, we are turning other work away for that window.

You may cancel within 5 business days of signing, provided kickoff has not started, and receive a full refund of the deposit. After kickoff, the deposit becomes non-refundable, because the discovery work it pays for is being performed. If discovery ends and you choose not to proceed to build, you keep every discovery artefact produced: the scope document, technical plan, and estimates are yours to take elsewhere.

Milestone payments are invoiced against deliverables defined in the statement of work. A milestone is considered delivered when the work is handed over for review, not when you approve it, though we do not treat a milestone as closed while legitimate defects remain open.

If you cancel mid-project, we reconcile the account: delivered and in-progress milestones are billable, and any balance you have paid beyond that point is refunded. If the reconciliation shows work performed beyond what you have paid, we invoice the difference rather than charging it silently.

Rework inside the agreed scope is not a refund matter. We fix defects in delivered work at no cost, for the duration of the warranty period stated in your agreement, typically 30 days from final handover.

Retainers are billed monthly in advance and reserve a fixed block of senior capacity for you. Either side may cancel a retainer with 14 days written notice, effective at the end of the current billing month.

The current month is not refunded once it has started, because the capacity has already been withheld from other clients. Any months billed in advance beyond the notice period are refunded in full. Unused hours inside a retainer month do not roll over and are not refundable — the value you are buying is guaranteed availability, not a bank of hours.

If we fail to deliver an agreed service level in a given month, you may request a pro-rated credit or refund for the affected portion. We would rather make it right with additional capacity, but the choice is yours.

Domains, hosting, cloud infrastructure, paid APIs, model usage, stock assets, fonts, plugins, and licences are frequently purchased on your behalf or provisioned in your name. These costs are non-refundable by us, because the money has already left for the vendor.

Where a vendor offers its own refund, we will help you claim it and will not charge for the time spent doing so. Wherever practical, we ask you to hold these accounts directly, so you keep ownership and a direct billing relationship.

You may cancel any engagement at any time, in writing, without giving a reason. Notice takes effect on the day we receive it, and we stop billable work immediately unless you ask us to complete something in flight.

Within 5 business days of cancellation we send a written reconciliation showing what was delivered, what was paid, and the resulting balance in either direction. Any refund owed to you follows the process in section 10. Alongside it we hand over work product paid for in full: source code, design files, content, credentials, and documentation.

Occasionally we end an engagement ourselves: the scope changes into something outside our competence, a key dependency never arrives, the working relationship stops being productive, or the request turns out to conflict with our legal or ethical obligations.

When the decision is ours and no fault of yours, we refund every payment for work not yet delivered, in full, and we do not charge a cancellation fee. We also provide a handover pack — code, assets, access, and a written summary of the state of play — so another team can pick the work up without starting over.

Delivered milestones and accepted deliverables. Hours already worked on time-and-materials engagements. Discovery once kickoff has occurred. The current month of an active retainer. Third-party costs already paid to vendors. Rush fees and out-of-hours surcharges once the accelerated work has been scheduled.

We also do not refund on the basis of a change in your business circumstances, a shift in internal priorities, or a decision not to launch work that was correctly built to the agreed specification. Those are real situations and we will talk through options with you, but they sit outside a refund.

Email hello@nutshellbytes.com with the subject line "Refund request" and include the project or retainer name, the invoice numbers concerned, the amount you believe is refundable, and a short description of what prompted the request. Anything you can add about specific deliverables helps us reconcile faster.

You do not need to prepare a case or justify the request. A sentence is enough. The detail simply lets us check the account against the statement of work without a round trip.

Approved refunds are returned to the original payment method. Card refunds typically appear within 5 to 10 business days of issue, depending on your bank. Bank transfers usually settle within 3 to 7 business days, and international transfers can take longer.

Refunds are issued in the currency of the original invoice. We do not carry the cost of currency movement between payment and refund, so the amount that lands may differ slightly from the amount you sent. Non-recoverable transaction fees charged by payment processors are deducted from the refunded amount where the processor does not return them to us.

Where the original payment method is closed or unavailable, we arrange a bank transfer to an account in the same name as the original payer. We do not issue refunds to a third party.

If you disagree with a reconciliation, reply and tell us where you think it is wrong. A named person reviews it and responds within 5 business days. Most disagreements are a differing reading of the scope document and are resolved in a single call.

Please raise a dispute with us before initiating a chargeback. A chargeback freezes the account, suspends active work, and moves a solvable conversation into a process neither side controls. We defend chargebacks raised without a prior attempt to resolve the matter, and we will supply the signed agreement, delivery record, and correspondence to the payment provider.

Unresolved disputes are handled under the governing law and dispute mechanism named in your agreement. Nothing in this policy limits statutory rights you may hold in your own jurisdiction.

We update this page as our services evolve, and the revision date at the top always reflects the current version. The version in force for your engagement is the one published on the date you signed, so a later change never reduces rights you already had.

Material changes affecting active clients are communicated by email before they take effect.