Self-service 30-day refund

What this control is

If your paid membership isn't for you, Verinode gives you a way to cancel and get your money back yourself, no ticket, no waiting on a reply. The Money-back guarantee row in Settings, Membership does three things in one click after you confirm: it cancels your Stripe subscription, refunds your most recent charge, and returns your account to the free Contributor tier. It only appears for paid memberships (Executive or Premier), and only within 30 days of when you first signed up.

This is a self-service control, not a support workflow. It exists so a new member who signed up, tried Verinode, and decided it isn't the right fit doesn't have to email anyone to get out. Verinode never talks you out of it in the flow: the control lays out exactly what will happen and you decide.

Where to find it

Open Settings and switch to the Membership tab. If you're on a paid tier, a row reads Money-back guarantee, with the note "Self-service within 30 days of signup" underneath it. That row is where everything below happens.

Two things gate whether you see this row at all:

• Tier. It only renders for Executive and Premier memberships. Contributor is already free, so there is nothing to refund and the row is absent entirely.
• Role. Only the roles authorized to manage billing on your account see the Membership tab in the first place.

The days-remaining window

While the control is loading, it briefly shows "Loading membership status…". Once it resolves, and you're inside the window, you'll see a button labeled Cancel + refund my membership, with a line underneath counting down: "N days left in your money-back window" (or "1 day left in your money-back window" on the last day). That count comes straight from the 30-day window: 30 days from the date your subscription was first created, not from today, not from your last invoice.

Two details worth knowing about how the window is measured:

• It's first-time only. The clock starts the moment your membership was first created. Renewing a membership month after month doesn't reset it and doesn't extend it. A long-tenured membership won't show the refund row's countdown at all, because by the time you're renewing, the original 30 days closed a long time ago.
• Upgrading doesn't reset it either. Moving from Executive to Premier (or the reverse) doesn't restart your money-back clock. It still runs from your original signup date.

What happens when you click through

1. 1Click Cancel + refund my membership. A confirm panel opens in place, framed in red as a deliberate warning color, the same treatment Verinode uses for Analyse-signal alerts elsewhere in the product.
2. 2Read the confirm copy: "Cancel your membership and refund? We'll cancel your Stripe subscription and refund the most recent charge. Your Intelligence Unit balance will zero out and your tier will drop to Contributor. This is irreversible."
3. 3Choose Keep membership to back out with no changes, or Yes, refund to proceed. While the request is running, the button reads "Refunding…".
4. 4On success, the panel is replaced with "Refund processed. Your membership is canceled." and a line underneath reading "Refreshing…". The page reloads on its own about a second and a half later so every number on screen, tier, subscription status, Intelligence Unit balance, comes from the freshly synced server state rather than stale client data.

Behind that single click, four things happen in order:

1. Your Stripe subscription is canceled immediately. Not at the end of the billing period, right away, with no proration.
2. Your most recent successful charge is refunded. Verinode looks at your last few charges and refunds the latest one that was paid and not already refunded.
3. Your Intelligence Unit balance is zeroed out. Whatever balance you're carrying, unused Intelligence Units from your monthly allotment or a purchased pack, drops to zero as a refund entry on your ledger.
4. Your tier drops to Contributor, the free tier, and every gated feature on the platform reverts to what a Contributor sees.

If the refund can't complete automatically

Canceling your subscription and refunding your charge are two separate calls to Stripe. If the cancellation succeeds but the refund itself fails to process, for example a transient issue on Stripe's side, the confirm panel shows: "We canceled your subscription, but the refund couldn't process automatically. Email support@verinode.ai, we'll handle it manually." Your subscription is already off in this case; only the charge refund needs a human to finish it.

Why the button might not be there, or might be disabled

If you're not inside the eligible window, the row shows explanatory text instead of the button:

• Window closed. If your 30 days have passed, you'll see: "Money-back window ended on [date]. Email support@verinode.ai to discuss." The date shown is your original 30-day cutoff, not today's date. Past this point a refund isn't automatic, but the door isn't closed, email support and they'll look at your specific case.
• Already used. If you've already run this exact control once on this membership, you'll see: "This membership has already been refunded." The refund is keyed to your specific subscription, so it can't be triggered twice, and clicking it again wouldn't cancel a second subscription or double-refund a charge even if you tried.
• Not applicable. For any other reason you don't qualify (for instance, there's no active paid subscription on the account to refund), you'll see the general fallback: "Self-service refunds aren't available for this membership."

What "tier drops to Contributor" actually means

Contributor is the free tier every operator starts on. It's not a downgrade to a lesser paid plan, it's the same tier you'd be on if you'd never upgraded at all. Once the refund lands, benchmarks, peer ratings, and other network intelligence that were unblurred on your paid tier go back to gated behind Contributor's limits, and the Intelligence Units used to run AI actions (research, IQ conversations, agent work) are at zero rather than your prior monthly allotment. You keep your account, your data, and everything you've connected. What changes is which parts of the platform's intelligence layer are unlocked and how many Intelligence Units you have to spend.

Best-practice example

Say you signed up for Executive 12 days ago, connected your job management tool, and spent a week comparing your numbers against the benchmarks. The Membership tab shows 18 days left in your money-back window. If Verinode isn't landing for your business at this point, click Cancel + refund my membership, read the confirm panel, and click Yes, refund. Within a second and a half the page reloads showing Contributor tier, a zeroed Intelligence Unit balance, and a canceled subscription, no email required. If instead you'd waited 40 days to decide, the row would already show the "Money-back window ended on…" message, and the path forward would be emailing support@verinode.ai directly.

Data sources