Refund Policy

1. The rules in brief

• One-time purchase: request a refund within 30 days of the charge.
• Having watched some of the course does not disqualify you from requesting inside that window.
• Subscription: cancelling stops future renewals. It does not automatically refund the period you already paid for.
• We target 10 business days to review a request and up to 10 business days after approval for the money to be sent back through Stripe.
• Duplicate charges, failed access, and material misdescription are refunded whether or not the standard window has passed.

2. What this policy covers

This policy applies to purchases made through SmartKourse checkout: one-time course purchases and recurring subscription plans. Everything sold is digital access to course content created by independent instructors, so there is nothing to return and no shipping to reverse — a refund simply reverses the charge and removes the access it paid for.

Certificate enablement fees and other creator-side charges are addressed in the Instructor Terms, not here.

3. One-time (lifetime) purchases

You may file a cancellation or refund request within 30 days of the purchase date. The date of the Stripe charge starts the clock, not the date you first opened the course. A request filed inside that window is reviewed on its merits; a request filed after it is normally declined unless one of the situations in section 6 applies.

Requests filed in the window are approved where the course did not deliver what its listing described, where the material was not usable for you, or where you simply decided the course was not a fit and have not exhausted its value. We do not require you to justify a change of mind in detail, but we do read what you write, and the more specific you are, the faster the decision.

4. Watching lessons before requesting

You do not lose the right to ask for a refund merely because you opened the course. Evaluating a course requires watching some of it, and a policy that voided eligibility on first play would be a trap. Within the 30-day window you may request a refund even after accessing lessons.

Consumption is still relevant to the decision, in one direction: a request filed after completing substantially all of a course, especially near the end of the window and in a pattern repeated across courses, looks like using the refund system to get content for free, and we treat it under section 15 rather than as an ordinary request.

5. Subscriptions

You can cancel a subscription at any time from your account. Cancellation stops the next automatic renewal. Cancellation does not automatically refund the billing period you have already paid for. You keep access for the remainder of that paid period, and then access ends.

• Accidental renewal. If a renewal charged you shortly before you intended to cancel and you have not used the new period, contact us — this is a routine approval, not an exception we grudgingly make.
• Failed payment. If a renewal fails, the subscription may go past due and access may be limited until payment succeeds or the subscription ends. No refund is involved because no payment was taken.
• Price changes. A price change applies only to future periods and only after notice. If you are charged a new price you were not notified about, tell us and we will refund the difference or the charge.
• Mid-period cancellation. We do not prorate unused days by default, because access continues through the end of the period you paid for.

6. Situations we refund regardless of the window

• Duplicate or repeated charges for the same access.
• Payment taken but access not granted, where we cannot fix the entitlement.
• The course was removed or is no longer available and you have not substantially consumed it.
• Material misdescription: the course is substantively not what the listing described.
• The course violates our policies and we remove it.
• Unauthorized use of your payment method, once verified.
• We terminate your account without cause, covering access you can no longer use.

7. Situations we normally decline

• Requests filed after the 30-day window, absent a section 6 situation.
• Dissatisfaction with an outcome — a course did not get you a job, a client, a passing score, or a particular income result. No course on this platform promises those, and we do not refund on that basis.
• An instructor updating, reorganizing, or improving course content after you bought it.
• Problems caused by your own device, network, or browser that we can help troubleshoot instead.
• Accounts terminated for violating the Acceptable Use Policy, including credential sharing or content piracy.
• Repeated refund requests forming the pattern described in section 15.

8. How to request a refund

1. Open your purchases or subscription settings and use the cancel or refund request flow where it is available for that purchase.
2. Otherwise, use the contact form or write to Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration).
3. Include the email on your account, the course name, the approximate purchase date, the amount, and a sentence about what went wrong. That is enough; you do not need to supply payment card details, and we will never ask for a full card number.

9. Review and payment timeline

Requests are reviewed by platform staff. We target 10 business days to reach a decision and notify you, and after approval we target 10 business days to issue Store Credit to your account. These are operational targets we work to, not guarantees; requests needing investigation of a dispute or fraud signal can take longer, and we will tell you if yours does.

After Store Credit is issued, it appears on your learner dashboard (when you have a balance) and can be applied at checkout toward a new course purchase.

10. How refunds are paid

When a refund is approved, the full refund amount is issued as SmartKourse Store Credit on your account. Store Credit can be applied toward eligible course purchases on SmartKourse. We do not return approved refunds to the original payment method, issue cash, bank transfers to a different account, or gift cards.

By completing a purchase on SmartKourse, you acknowledge and agree that approved refunds are fulfilled as Store Credit as described above.

11. Partial refunds and discounts

We may issue a partial refund where only part of a charge should be returned — for example a duplicate portion of a bundled charge, a pricing error, or a negotiated resolution you agree to. Where a discount code was applied, the refund is of the amount you actually paid, not the undiscounted list price. Refunding a purchase does not automatically restore a single-use discount code, though we can usually reissue one on request.

12. What happens to your access

A refund removes the access it paid for. For a one-time purchase, the course entitlement is revoked. For a subscription refund, access for the refunded period ends. Lesson progress markers stored in your browser are not deleted by us, but they will no longer open anything you no longer have access to.

13. Chargebacks and bank disputes

You have the right to dispute a charge with your bank, and using that right is not a violation of our terms. We do not suspend, penalize, or blacklist accounts for filing a good-faith chargeback. We would simply rather hear from you first — contacting us is usually faster than a bank dispute, and it lets us fix an access problem instead of unwinding a payment.

Practically, a dispute reverses the funds while it is open, so related course access is typically suspended until it resolves. If the dispute is decided in your favor, we treat the purchase as refunded. If it is decided in ours and you still believe the charge was wrong, write to Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration) and we will review it again on the merits.

The narrow exception is fraud or abuse: disputes filed on a payment method that is not yours, disputes claiming non-delivery of content that was demonstrably consumed, or a repeated purchase-consume-dispute cycle. Those are handled as fraud, and can result in loss of access and account termination.

14. Effect on instructors

Refunds and disputes adjust instructor balances. Because instructor transfers are held before payout, most refunds are reconciled before any money has left the platform. Where a transfer has already been made, it may be reversed or recovered from future earnings. Details are in the Payout Disclosure. A refund decision is ours to make and is not delegated to the instructor.

15. Abuse of this policy

A generous refund window depends on it not being farmed. Where we see a pattern — repeated full-consumption refunds, coordinated requests across accounts, refunds combined with redistribution of the content, or requests paired with credential sharing — we may decline the request, revoke access, limit future purchases, or close the account. We look at patterns, not at a single unlucky purchase.

16. Your statutory rights

Nothing in this policy limits refund or cancellation rights you have under mandatory consumer-protection law in your jurisdiction. Where local law gives you a stronger right than this policy, that law applies. Automatic-renewal cancellation requirements in particular vary by state and country, and our compliance posture on those statutes is subject to the counsel review noted at the top of this page.

17. Contact

Refund questions: Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration), or the contact form. Related reading: Terms of Service and Marketplace Disclosure.