Cancellation and refund

worldgovdata sells prepaid API credits. You top up once for an amount you choose, the credits sit on your balance until you spend them, and they do not expire. There is no subscription, nothing renews, no card is stored, and nothing is ever charged to you that you did not start yourself.

Because nothing recurs, there is no subscription to cancel. Cancellation on this page means stopping a payment that has not completed yet (clause 08) or closing your account (clause 12).

One credit covers one observation row, and the price of a credit is flat and inclusive of tax — the amount you type is the amount charged. A request that fails costs zero credits, so downtime and errors never drain your balance. Full detail is on the pricing page.

Verify your email address and 2,000 credits land on your account — 2,000 observation rows, at no cost, with no card and no expiry. Every metadata endpoint is free whatever your balance, so you can read the whole catalogue, search it and inspect every indicator definition without spending a credit.

That grant exists for one reason: so that nobody has to buy before they know whether this API suits them. Point your own code at it, measure what you actually consume, and top up once you are sure. The trial is the answer to “what if it turns out I do not need this” — which is why the answer in clause 03 can be a straight no.

Once credits are on your balance, the purchase is final. We do not refund unused credits, we do not buy credits back for cash, and we do not pay out a balance when an account closes. This holds whether you bought yesterday or last year, and whether you have spent none of it or all of it.

We would rather say that plainly than leave it as a maybe you have to argue about. The reasoning is short: the trial above is free and needs no card, credits never expire so an unused balance is waiting rather than lost, and a one-off prepaid unit with no subscription and no expiry only works if the money settles at the point of sale.

• ·No expiry. Credits stay on the account for as long as it is open. We will not quietly time them out, and there is no inactivity fee.
• ·No cash value. A credit is a licence to consume a measured quantity of the service. It is not currency, not a deposit, not a stored-value instrument, it earns no interest, and it cannot be sold, gifted, pooled across accounts or transferred to another person.
• ·No partial buy-back. There is no route by which a balance becomes money again, including “refund half and I will keep the rest”.

A wrong charge is not a refund policy question. It is an error, and we correct errors. Clause 03 has no application here: there is no time limit, no discretion on our side and nothing for you to prove.

• ·Charged but no credits arrived. Almost always a delayed confirmation that resolves itself within minutes; see delivery for what to do. If credits genuinely cannot be delivered, we refund the payment in full.
• ·Charged twice for one purchase. We refund the duplicate in full as soon as we can see it, whether or not you asked. If you spot it first, tell us and we will not make you prove anything.
• ·A charge you did not authorise. Tell us at once and also tell your bank. We refund in full, revoke the API keys on the account and help you secure it. We do not deduct spent credits from an unauthorised charge refund.
• ·Wrong amount or wrong currency. We refund the difference, or the whole charge so you can buy again, whichever you prefer.
• ·A charge we made in error — the wrong amount, the wrong account, a bug on our side. Full refund of the difference or of the whole amount, and we tell you what happened.
• ·We charged for something we could not deliver. Full refund. If we retire the service entirely, we refund every unused credit anyone holds — that promise is in clause 08 of the terms.

Any tax we charged goes back with the money. We do not keep the tax on a charge we are giving back.

If you are a consumer — an individual acting outside your trade, business, craft or profession — resident in the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you normally have 14 days to withdraw from a distance contract without giving a reason. That is Article 9 of the Consumer Rights Directive (2011/83/EU) and the equivalent provision in UK law. Most people buying API credits are buying for a business and are not consumers; if that is you, this clause does not apply and clause 03 does.

Why immediate delivery normally waives it

Digital content supplied immediately is the documented exception. Under Article 16(m) the withdrawal right is lost once supply has begun, but only where you gave prior express consent to supply beginning at once and acknowledged that you would lose the right by doing so. Credits appear on your balance within seconds of a confirmed payment, so a purchase here is a request for immediate supply: by placing it you consent to supply beginning immediately and acknowledge that the 14-day right ends when it does.

How to withdraw

Withdrawing is a statement, not a form. Email queries@worldgovdata.com within 14 days of the purchase, say that you are withdrawing and quote the receipt number. You may use the model withdrawal form in Annex I of the Directive if you prefer, but you are not required to. We refund within 14 days of receiving your notice, to the original payment method, and the statutory clock takes precedence over the timings in clause 07.

Nothing on this page limits a right that mandatory consumer law gives you, and nothing on it could. A change of mind and a broken product are different things: we say no to the first and we fix the second.

• ·EU, EEA and UK consumers keep the statutory conformity rights for digital content and digital services. If what we supplied is faulty, or is not what we described, the remedy is a statutory one — bringing it into conformity, a price reduction, or ending the contract and getting your money back — and none of the windows on this page shortens it. You may complain to your national consumer protection authority and may use the European Commission’s online dispute resolution platform.
• ·Indian consumers — the seller is an Indian company, so the Consumer Protection Act 2019 applies as well. A deficiency in service is a complaint you are entitled to bring, and this policy does not stand in its way.
• ·Everywhere else, if the mandatory law of the country where you live gives you a better remedy than this policy does, that law applies and this policy yields to it. See clause 17 of the terms.

One thing this does not reach: dissatisfaction with the underlying statistics. We publish what the institutions on the sources page publish, and we cannot change their numbers. If we described an indicator wrongly, that is our error and this clause covers it; if the number itself is one you disagree with, it is not.

If a payment is still processing and no credits have been added, tell us and we will cancel the order rather than complete it and unwind it afterwards. Once the payment provider has captured the money and the credits have landed, there is nothing left to cancel — clause 03 applies, unless clause 04, 05 or 06 does. Orders that never complete expire on their own and are never charged.

You are entitled to raise a chargeback with your bank, and nothing here removes that right. We would rather you emailed us first, for a practical reason: where a refund is actually due we can usually send it in days, whereas a chargeback takes weeks and locks the account while it runs.

• ·When a chargeback is opened, we suspend the account and its keys until the dispute is resolved. This is the payment processor’s requirement, not a punishment.
• ·We respond to the bank with the order record, the delivery timestamp and the usage ledger. If the chargeback succeeds, the corresponding credits are removed from the balance.
• ·We do not add fees, penalties or surcharges for a chargeback. We do reserve the right to decline future purchases from an account with a pattern of them.
• ·If you raise one by mistake, tell us — a withdrawn chargeback is faster for everyone than one that runs its course.

The price of a credit and the credit cost of an endpoint can change. Neither ever re-prices credits you already hold, and neither creates a right to a refund by itself. If we increase the credit cost of an existing endpoint we publish it at least 30 days ahead, in the changelog.

There is one related exit. If we change the terms in a way that materially reduces your rights, clause 15 of those terms lets you stop before the change takes effect and have your unused balance back. That is a right you get because we changed the deal, not a change of mind, so clause 03 does not block it.

Every purchase produces a receipt number immediately and an invoice you can open and print from account billing. Any refund appears against the original order there, with the tax adjusted on it, and the credit movement appears in the ledger on your usage page. If you need an invoice reissued with different billing details — a company name, a GSTIN — email queries@worldgovdata.com and we will do it.

You can delete your account at any time from account settings. It is self-serve and needs no approval.

What deletion does to your data, and the one financial record tax law obliges us to keep, is set out in the privacy policy.