Can I refund a subscription charge mid-month?

Subscription charges on Valid Email Checker are not refunded mid-month as a matter of course. Once a monthly cycle is billed, the credits for that cycle are allocated to your Monthly bucket and the cycle runs to its end. Cancelling the subscription stops the next renewal but does not, on its own, trigger a refund of the current period. That said, there are a handful of situations where a mid-cycle refund is available — they all flow through the refund inquiry process and require admin review.

The default: no automatic prorated refund

When you cancel a Monthly subscription, the cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period (cancel_at_period_end). Your Monthly credits remain usable through that end date. After that, the subscription stops, no future charges are made, and your PAYG balance stays untouched. There is no proration and no refund for the unused portion of the current month. See how cancellation works.

When mid-cycle refunds ARE considered

• Renewal billed after a confirmed cancellation. If you cancelled before the renewal date but the charge went through anyway, that is a service error and we refund. The audit trail (cancellation timestamp vs. renewal timestamp) is unambiguous.
• Documented platform outage during the cycle. If our service was substantially unavailable for a meaningful portion of the cycle and you can show the impact, file an inquiry. Admin reviews case-by-case.
• Duplicate Stripe charge. Two charges in the same cycle for the same subscription is always refundable.
• Unauthorized access discovered before substantial credit use. If someone else activated a subscription on your account and you catch it early, file an inquiry with the security report.
• Statutory withdrawal rights on Paddle purchases. EU/EEA/UK/Switzerland/Turkey/Israel customers have a 14-day unconditional withdrawal right from the date of purchase; South Korea/Brazil/China/Canada 7 days; Singapore 5 days. Refunds in this window must go through paddle.net directly — we cannot process them.

How a mid-cycle subscription refund actually runs

If an admin approves a money refund on a Stripe subscription charge, the process-refund function refunds via Stripe, marks the payment_transactions row as refunded, and cancels the user_subscriptions row immediately. Credits attributed to that cycle are revoked from your buckets, capped at the remaining balance — if you have already spent them, we only claw back what is still there. A row appears in your Credits History showing the revocation.

The faster alternative for most cases

If you simply changed your mind about the subscription but want the credits you already paid for, the better move is to cancel renewal (which stops next month) and let the current month run out. You keep the credits you paid for, the cycle ends, and no renewal hits. Cancellation through Account Settings → Subscription does this with one click. See how do I cancel my subscription.