Refunds and cancellation
This is the policy that takes effect the day checkout opens. It is published now, before anything can be bought, because terms written while there is revenue to defend are written differently from terms written while there is none. What follows is what we will be held to.
What this policy covers
The seller bound by it is HADAL INSTRUMENTS LTD, a company registered in England and Wales under number 17382774, trading as Hadal Instruments. That matters for the statutory position set out below: the rights described there are rights against a UK trader, and this names which one.
It covers licences bought through Hadal's own checkout — the terminal licence, instrument licences and any bundle of them.
It does not cover instruments bought through a third-party trading marketplace. Those sales are made by the marketplace, refunded under the marketplace's rules, and we do not control that process. Where an instrument is sold in both places, the purchase route determines which policy applies, and the route will be stated at the point of purchase rather than left for you to work out afterwards.
Assays are a different transaction, and their terms are NOT YET PUBLISHED. The Assay Desk sells a one-off measurement rather than a licence, so the annual-term machinery below does not describe it: a single piece of work, delivered once, has different cancellation and refund questions — chiefly what happens when an artifact turns out not to support the question, and up to what point a commissioned run can be called off. Intake is closed and nothing there can be bought today, and the assay terms publish in the same act that opens it, beside the data-handling terms. Publishing licence terms while assay terms were merely implied is the gap this paragraph exists to close.
The licence term, stated plainly
The licence is annual. There is no monthly plan. Billing can be taken once a year or in four quarterly instalments — quarterly billing softens the cash, not the commitment.
The disclosure that matters most: paying quarterly does not create four exit points. The term is one year in both cases, and the remaining instalments belong to that term. This is the single sentence most subscription disputes turn on, so it is stated here in the same size as everything else.
- Term length
- 1 year
- Billing options
- Annual · quarterly
- Licence fee
- NOT YET PUBLISHED
Evaluation before you commit
There is no free trial. We would rather say that in the first line than bury it. Commissioning an instrument is real work by a real person, and work that is given away is work that gets rationed — usually from the customers who paid.
Three routes exist instead, and two of them cost nothing:
- The receipts corpus. Published measurements, their methods and their limits, readable without an account and without talking to anyone. The corpus is currently empty — see the methodology page for what publishes into it.
- A read-only demonstration environment running on synthetic data, so the instrument can be handled before it is bought. Status:NOT YET PUBLISHED.
- A paid pilot of 7 days, with support included, credited in full against the first licence term if you convert. Pay it, use it, and if you buy, it costs you nothing in the end. The pilot fee is NOT YET PUBLISHED.
The pilot is a filter placed before the hours, not a paywall placed in front of the product. It exists so that the people who do buy get answered properly.
Renewal disclosure
A licence renews automatically for a further annual term unless renewal is switched off. That is disclosed here, it will be disclosed again at checkout before you pay, and it will be disclosed again in the notice that precedes each renewal. Three times, in the same words.
What renews
The annual licence term, at the price stated in the renewal notice. Under quarterly billing, renewal is still annual — it is the term that renews, not the instalment.
When
On the anniversary of the day the term began. That date is shown in your account from the moment the licence is issued, not discovered on a bank statement.
What notice you get
A written notice before every renewal, stating the renewal date, the exact amount and the one control that stops it. The notice is sent whether or not you have logged in, because a notice you have to go looking for is not a notice.
- Notice before renewal
- ALWAYS
- Advance notice period
- NOT YET PUBLISHED
- Price rise without notice
- NEVER
The advance notice period is a commercial term I have not yet ruled, so it prints its own absence rather than a number nobody agreed to. The commitment that is already fixed is the one above it: no renewal is ever taken without a prior notice stating the date and the exact amount.
How you cancel
Cancelling stops the next renewal. It is designed to take less effort than buying did, which is the opposite of how most subscriptions are built.
- Sign in to your account.
- Open Account → Licence.
- Select Cancel renewal. It is one control on that page, not behind a menu.
- Confirm once. A written confirmation is emailed to you immediately.
Access then runs to the end of the period you have already paid for. Cancelling does not cut you off early and does not trigger a further charge.
What you will never be asked to do
- Speak to anyone. There is no retention call and no "let us find you a better fit" step.
- Give a reason. There is no exit survey standing between you and the control.
- Cancel by email, by post, or by opening a support ticket, because the button was removed.
- Click through a sequence of offers designed to make you give up.
If the account page is unreachable for any reason, a written cancellation sent to the published support address is sufficient and takes effect on the date you send it, not the date we get round to it. That address is support@hadalinstruments.com, published on the support page and listed with every other route on the contact page.
The refund window
14 days from the start of a licence term — including a renewal term — for a full refund of the amount paid for that term. No reason required. We do not ask what went wrong, though we will read it if you tell us.
What voids it
- The window closing. From day 15 the term is not refundable. You keep access to the end of it and can switch off renewal at any point.
- Breach of the licence. Redistributing the software, sharing seat credentials, or reselling instrument output as a data feed ends the licence without a refund.
- A payment reversal opened first. If a chargeback is already in progress, the refund is handled through that process instead — the two cannot run at once.
- Cycling. Repeated buy-and-refund on the same account or payment instrument. Stated so that it is a rule rather than a judgement call made later.
What does not void it
- Using the product. Heavily, on real data, every day of the window.
- Changing your mind, or deciding it is not for you after all.
- Getting an answer you did not like. An instrument that tells you something unwelcome is working.
The pilot fee is credited in full against the licence on conversion, so it is not refunded twice. If you take the pilot and do not convert, the pilot is what you bought and it is not separately refundable once it has run.
Your position under UK law
UK consumer law sits on top of the refund policy this page sets out, and what follows describes how the two interact. It is our reading of the position and not legal advice, and nothing on this page reduces a right you hold by statute.
Consumers and businesses are not in the same position
The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 protect consumers buying at a distance. A firm buying a seat is not a consumer, so those rights do not reach it. The 14-day window the refund-window section sets is contractual and applies to both — a business customer gets the same window a consumer does, because we would rather run one policy than two.
The statutory cancellation right, and how it can be waived
A consumer buying digital content at a distance normally has 14 days to cancel. That right is lost if the consumer expressly consents to the content being supplied immediately during the cancellation period and acknowledges that the right will be lost as a result. That waiver is what a "start my access now" box is doing, on every site that shows you one.
How Hadal handles it:
- Checkout asks whether you want access immediately. It is a real question with a real second answer, never a pre-ticked box and never bundled into the terms checkbox.
- Choose immediate access and the consent and acknowledgement are recorded, and the statutory right is waived. The 14-day contractual window above still applies, so in practice you keep the same 14 days you would have had.
- Choose to wait and delivery holds until the statutory period ends, leaving the right untouched.
Where a licence is a service supplied over time rather than a download, and you ask for it to start during the cancellation period, cancelling means paying only for the proportion actually supplied up to that point. We will not charge more than that proportion.
Rights that cannot be signed away
Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, digital content supplied to a consumer must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described. If it is not, the remedies are repair, replacement, or a refund, and no term on this page removes them. A defective instrument is not a matter for goodwill; it is a matter for that Act.
The subscription-contract provisions of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 tighten renewal reminders and cooling-off for subscriptions. Their commencement is set by secondary legislation and we do not assert a date for it here. The renewal and cancellation commitments above are written to sit on the right side of that direction of travel regardless of when it lands.
If something goes wrong
Ask us first. A refund inside the window is granted on request, so raising a dispute to get one costs you time you did not need to spend.
You are entitled to know who you are contracting with before you pay. The entity that takes the payment, issues the invoice and processes the refund is HADAL INSTRUMENTS LTD, registered in England and Walesunder number 17382774, as stated at the top of this page. What is still NOT YET PUBLISHED is whether a payment processor will additionally act as merchant of record for the transaction — an arrangement that would put a second name on your statement. That is undecided rather than hidden, and it publishes with the checkout.
No alternative dispute resolution scheme or ombudsman is named on this page, because Hadal is not currently a member of one. If that changes, the scheme is named here first.
Status of this document
If a commitment on this page ever stops being true, it comes off the page. It does not get softened into something we can still technically claim.