Refunds

The store you bought in is the merchant of record

Everything in Alma is bought inside the app. On iPhone and iPad the seller is Apple; on Android it is Google. They take the payment, they issue the receipt, they calculate and remit the tax, and they hold the money. Your card details never reach us — we could not find your purchase by them if we tried.

So a refund is not a button we can press. The money is in their account rather than ours, which is why the request goes to them. We can ask on your behalf, and we do, but the decision and the transfer are theirs. Nothing on this website sells anything, so there is no third case.

How to ask

Each store has a self-service route, and it is faster than we are. Sign in with the account that made the purchase:

• Apple — https://reportaproblem.apple.com. What can be refunded and how long it takes is their own page.
• Google — https://play.google.com/store/account/orderhistory, then request a refund on the purchase. Their policy, including the window in which it happens automatically, is here.
• Or write to hello@pazl.ai with the email address on your Alma account — or the account id from Settings if you never signed in — and the order number from the store's receipt. We ask them for you, and we tell you what they said even when the answer is no.

Which of those to use: the store, if you simply want your money back. Us, if the reason is something we did — because then we are the ones with the evidence, and a request that arrives from us with the fault described is a different request from an anonymous one.

Where we ask for a refund without arguing

These are our faults, or your right, and neither is a judgement call:

• The reading never generated, or generated and would not open.
• The chart was wrong because of an error on our side rather than a birth time you were unsure of.
• You were charged twice for the same thing.
• You were charged after cancelling.
• An outage of ours cost you a subscription month you had paid for.
• You changed your mind within fourteen days — see the withdrawal right below, which we do not treat as waived.

You do not have to prove any of this. If the record shows it, we ask for the refund and we tell you it has been asked for.

Nothing is written until you open it

A chapter is generated the first time you open it, not at the moment you pay. The archive is forty-one chapters across eight systems, eight of which are the free samples anybody can read; buying it opens the other thirty-three, and opening them is not the same as writing them. Each one is written when you go to it, from your chart as it stands then, and stored so that it says the same thing every time afterwards.

That is the reason this page can say what it says next. At the second the store charges you, nothing has been delivered — and a promise that you have given up a right over text nobody has written yet is not a promise anybody should be asked to keep.

The 14-day withdrawal right, which we do not treat as waived

In the EU and the UK you have fourteen days to change your mind about something bought online. Digital content can be an exception to that, but only when three things have happened: you expressly agreed that supply starts immediately, you acknowledged that starting immediately costs you the right, and you were sent confirmation of both on something durable — an email you keep, not a page you passed through.

None of those three is collected by a store's purchase sheet, and we no longer run a checkout that could collect them. So we do not stand on the waiver at all. If you tell us within fourteen days of buying that you have changed your mind, we ask the store for the whole price back, we do not ask you why, and we do not tell you to read a policy first.

What we cannot do is pay it ourselves, and this page will not pretend otherwise. The money is with Apple or Google. What we can do is ask, say plainly that the right applies, and keep asking — and if a store refuses a withdrawal the law gives you, tell us, because that is a case we want to know about rather than one we would like you to give up on.

When the whole price comes back, what it bought closes: the archive stops opening, or the system you bought stops opening. Money back with the reading kept is not a refund, it is a hundred percent discount, and we would rather refuse the second than pretend it is the first.

We do not deduct for the chapters already written for you, and we do not split the purchase into the part that was performed and the part that was not. We could — we know exactly which chapters exist — but any figure we set for how much of a book you have read would be a number we invented, and one invented number is worse for this document than a policy that occasionally costs us a sale. Writing on demand is what makes that question arise at all, and the risk of it is ours rather than yours.

If there is an email address on your Alma account, a confirmation of what you bought is sent to it as well as the store's own receipt. Where that letter and this page do not say quite the same thing, this one is the more generous of the two and this one is the one that is honoured.

After the fourteen days, the list above is the policy: our faults, asked for without argument, and otherwise a request we forward and the store decides.

A year is not delivered on the first day

The yearly plan is a different case in law and in fact. It is not a thing handed over at once — it is twelve months of access to everything, including systems that are rewritten as the sky moves, and on day ten of it nothing like the whole has been performed. No purchase sheet ends your right to withdraw from a service that has barely started.

So: withdraw from a plan within fourteen days and what is owed back is the part of the year you have not used, worked out on the days that have passed, and the plan ends there rather than running on. We close the plan at our end the same day rather than leaving it quietly running to its original date; the money is returned by the store, and the proportion is the one the law sets rather than one either of us prefers. After fourteen days the ordinary rule takes over — cancelling stops the next charge and the period you have already paid for runs to its end, with your access intact until it does.

It is asked for rather than pressed: there is no withdrawal button in Alma, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Write to hello@pazl.ai, in any words, or use the form below. A person answers it.

Subscriptions

Cancelling stops the next charge. It does not undo the period you are in: that period was paid for and it runs to its end, with your access intact until it does. Nothing is taken back at the moment you cancel, which is why the screen tells you the date instead.

Cancelling happens on the store's own account screen, because that is where a subscription bought in an app lives. The two taps, and what happens after them, are in subscription terms.

One-time purchases

A system bought outright is yours permanently. It does not lapse, it is not rented, and cancelling a subscription does not take it away.

If you bought one system and then want the rest within thirty days, the rest of the archive is offered at its price less what you paid for that reading. You do not have to ask for it and you do not have to refund anything to get it. Two conditions are worth knowing rather than discovering: it is offered while you hold one system and nothing wider, and it is set against the price in the currency you actually paid in — we do not convert what you paid into another currency to work it out.

The withdrawal form, if you would rather use one

You do not need this. An email to hello@pazl.ai saying you have changed your mind is a withdrawal, in any words and in any language, and we answer it the same way. The form exists because European law says a trader has to offer one, and because some people would rather fill in a form than write a letter.

Copy the version in your own language, fill in the four blanks, and send it to hello@pazl.ai. We act on it and we forward it to the store that took the payment, so that you do not have to send it twice.

How the money comes back

To the payment method you bought with, by the store that took it. How long it then takes to appear is between their systems and your bank, and any number we printed here would be a guess about somebody else’s.

If your receipt did not come from Apple or Google

Then the payment went through Paddle.com Market Ltd, the card processor Alma is configured with, and they are the merchant of record for it: same principle, different company. Their receipt carries their own support link, and everything above applies with their name in place of the store’s. If you are not sure which of the three you paid, send us the receipt and we will tell you.