Cancellation and refund

worldgovdata sells prepaid API credits. You buy a pack once; the credits sit in your account until you spend them or ask for them back. There is no subscription, nothing renews, no card is stored, and nothing is ever charged to you that you did not initiate.

Because nothing recurs, there is no subscription to cancel. “Cancellation” on this page means either cancelling a purchase (clauses 02 and 03) or closing your account (clause 11).

One credit covers roughly 100 observation rows. A request that fails costs zero credits, so downtime and errors never drain your balance and never need a refund. Full detail is on the pricing page.

If you are a consumer 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.

Digital content delivered immediately is the documented exception. Under Article 16(m) of the Consumer Rights Directive — and the equivalent provision in UK law — that right is lost once supply has begun, provided you gave prior express consent to immediate supply and acknowledged that you would lose the right by doing so. Credits appear in your account within seconds of payment, so at checkout we ask you to give exactly that consent and that acknowledgement, and we record it. We are telling you this plainly rather than burying it in a checkbox, because a refund policy nobody understands is not a refund policy.

If you did not give that consent, or supply had not begun, your statutory withdrawal right is unaffected and you can exercise it in full. Nothing on this page removes a right that mandatory consumer law gives you — see clause 12.

Within 14 days of purchase

Full refund of every credit you have not spent. No reason required, no questions asked, no restocking fee. Email us with your receipt number and we return the money to the card or account you paid from.

Between 14 days and 12 months of purchase

We still refund unused credits on request. This is discretionary rather than a statutory entitlement, and in practice we say yes: the only cases where we would not are the ones in clause 07.

How the amount is worked out

Your balance is a single number — we do not tag each credit with the purchase it came from. So we value the credits you still hold against your purchases working backwards from the most recent, at the price you actually paid for each:

Amounts are rounded to the nearest whole unit of currency in your favour. The 2,000 credits granted free when you verify your email have no cash value and are never part of a refund — if your balance is made up only of grant credits, there is nothing to refund and nothing was paid.

Credits are removed from your balance at the moment we initiate the refund, not when the money lands. Partial refunds are fine: ask for a specific number of credits back and keep the rest.

These are not discretionary. There is no time limit and no argument.

• ·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 and let you buy again, whichever you prefer.
• ·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.

If a payment is still processing and no credits have been added, tell us and we will cancel the order rather than complete and refund it. Once the payment provider has captured the money, cancellation becomes a refund and clause 05 applies. Orders that never complete expire on their own and are never charged.

Short list, stated up front so nothing is a surprise later.

• ·Credits you have already spent. Data was delivered under a licence you now hold; that cannot be handed back. The one exception is an unauthorised charge (clause 04).
• ·The free signup grant. It cost nothing, so there is nothing to return.
• ·Credits forfeited when we terminate for a serious breach of the terms or the acceptable use policy — and only to the extent that forfeiture is proportionate to the breach. If we suspend you and it turns out we were wrong, you get the credits and, if you prefer, the money.
• ·Requests made more than 12 months after the purchase, unless mandatory law says otherwise. Ask anyway; we read everything.

Dissatisfaction with the underlying statistics is not a ground for refusing a refund — it is a perfectly good reason to want one, and clause 03 covers it. What we cannot do is change the numbers, because they are published by the institutions named on the sources page.

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: we can usually refund 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 plus a straight refund is faster for everyone.

Pack prices 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; if that change makes the credits you are holding materially less useful to you, ask for a refund under clause 03 and we will treat the request as if it were inside the 14-day window.

Every purchase produces a receipt number immediately and an invoice you can open and print from account billing. Refunds appear against the original order there, 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 tax registration number — email connect@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.

Nothing on this page limits a right that mandatory consumer law gives you. If your national law gives you a better remedy than this policy does, that law applies and this policy does not stand in its way.

Consumers in the EU, EEA and UK also keep the statutory conformity rights for digital content and services — if what we supplied is not what was described, the remedy is a statutory one and is not limited by the windows above. You may complain to your national consumer protection authority, and you may use the European Commission’s online dispute resolution platform. We would much rather you emailed us; see clause 17 of the terms.