The short version
- Failed job? Credits come back automatically — you don't need to ask.
- First payment on a plan, within 14 days, barely used? Full refund, no interrogation.
- Unused credit pack, within 14 days? Full refund.
- Forgot to cancel and got renewed? Tell us within 7 days and we'll refund it if you haven't used the new period.
- Try it free first — signed-out visitors get free jobs daily and a free account gets 30 credits a month, so nobody has to pay to find out whether the output looks right.
Automatic refunds (no request needed)
Two things are handled by the system itself:
- Failed jobs. Credits are charged when a job starts. If the encoder reports a failure, the exact amount is returned to your balance automatically, once, and appears in /dashboard/credit-history.
- Jobs we never ran. If a job never reaches the encoder — an upload that couldn't be staged, a provider outage before processing — it is treated the same way.
If a job clearly failed but the credits didn't come back within a few minutes, that's a bug. Email us with the job and we'll fix both the balance and the bug.
Subscriptions (Pro, monthly or yearly)
1. First payment — 14-day money back
If the service isn't what you expected, ask within 14 days of your first payment on a plan and we'll refund it in full, provided you have used no more than 20% of that period's credits (for example, up to 120 of Pro's 600). We don't ask you to justify the decision, though telling us what went wrong genuinely helps.
Used more than that? We can usually still refund the unused portion pro rata — ask.
2. Renewals you didn't mean to keep
Subscriptions renew automatically. If you meant to cancel and a renewal caught you out, contact us within 7 days of the charge: if you haven't spent credits from the new period, we refund it and cancel the plan. This is a "forgot to cancel" allowance, not a monthly one — repeated use of it may be declined.
3. Cancelling normally
You can cancel from your dashboard at any time. Cancellation stops the next renewal; your plan and its credits stay active until the end of the period you already paid for. We don't refund the remainder of a period you have been using, except under the cases above or where the law requires it.
Yearly plans. Credits are released month by month over the year. If you cancel a yearly plan after the 14-day window, we'll refund the whole months not yet released, minus any discount that only applied because you committed for a year.
One-time credit packs
- Unused, within 14 days — full refund, and the credits are removed from your balance.
- Partly used, within 14 days — we refund the unused credits at the price you paid per credit.
- After 14 days — credits from packs never expire, so they stay in your account and are spent after your monthly plan credits. We generally don't refund them at that point.
Always refundable, whatever the timing
- Duplicate or wrong charges — billed twice, billed after cancelling, billed the wrong amount.
- Unauthorised charges — someone used your card without permission (we'll verify, then refund).
- Extended outage — if the compressor is unusable for more than 24 consecutive hours because of a problem on our side, ask and we'll credit or refund the affected period.
- Service withdrawn — if we retire a paid feature you're paying for, or shut down, we refund the unused portion of your prepayment.
What we usually don't refund
- Credits already spent on successful jobs. The encoding time was bought and burned. If the output was genuinely broken — corrupt file, wrong duration, audio missing — that's a defect, not a preference: send the job and we'll re-run it or return the credits.
- "The file didn't shrink enough." How much a video compresses depends on the source. Already-compressed footage may only drop 20–40%. The free tier exists so you can test your own material before paying.
- Uploading the wrong file, or picking settings you later regret. Sorry — the machine time was still spent.
- Problems outside the service — your network dropping mid-upload after the job completed, a platform still rejecting a file that met the size you asked for, and so on.
- Accounts closed for breaking the Terms of Service.
Your statutory rights
If you're a consumer in the EU, UK or another place with mandatory refund rules, those rules win wherever they give you more than this policy — including the 14-day right of withdrawal for digital services. Note that by starting a compression job you ask us to begin performance immediately, which can reduce the withdrawal right for the part already delivered.
How to ask
Email support@vidsmaller.com from the address on your account with:
- the date and amount of the charge (or the Stripe receipt)
- what you'd like refunded, and briefly why
- for job-related problems: the job or file name, and a screenshot or error message if you have one
What happens next:
- Reply within 2 business days — usually much sooner.
- Decision within 5 business days. Clear-cut cases (duplicate charge, unused pack, unwanted renewal) are normally approved on the spot.
- Money back issued through Stripe to your original payment method within 3 business days of approval; your bank then typically takes 5–10 days to show it.
Refunds are always made in the original currency and to the original payment method. We can offer account credit instead if you'd rather, but only if you ask for it.
Chargebacks
Please email us before disputing a charge with your bank. A chargeback costs us a fee on top of the amount, takes months to resolve, and automatically suspends the account while it runs — whereas a refund request is usually settled the same day. If you genuinely can't reach us, dispute away; but give us a chance first.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy; the date at the top changes with it. The version in force when you paid is the one that applies to that payment.