How to Get a Refund on an AI Subscription (Policy Guide)

TL;DR: Refunds on AI subscriptions aren't decided by the AI company alone. Where you paid decides who processes it: the vendor for a direct purchase, Apple or Google if you paid through their store, and a reseller's own terms for a marketplace or lifetime deal. Windows run from 24 hours to 14 days, verified from each vendor's own page below.

Who actually owes you the money back?

The instinct is to treat the AI company as the one and only party who can refund you, because it's the name on your bank statement and the product you're unhappy with. That instinct is right about half the time.

It's right when you subscribed directly on the company's own website or app, using a card the company itself charged. It's wrong when you subscribed through the iOS App Store, Google Play, or a reseller like AppSumo, because in those cases a different company processed the charge and holds the money. The AI vendor can often see that you paid, but it frequently cannot touch the transaction, refund it, or even see the amount. That single fact, more than any specific day count, decides who you should actually be emailing.

Did you subscribe directly, through an app store, or through a reseller?

Work out which of these three describes your purchase before you contact anyone:

1. Direct, on the vendor's own site or web app. You went to the company's own checkout (chatgpt.com, claude.ai, perplexity.ai, or similar) and paid with a card or PayPal through their own billing system. The vendor's own support team can see the charge and can refund it, subject to their policy.
2. Through Apple's App Store or Google Play. You subscribed inside the vendor's iOS or Android app, and your bank statement shows a charge from "Apple" or "Google," not from the AI company's name. Apple or Google is the merchant of record here. They collected your money, and only they can approve a refund of it.
3. Through a reseller, marketplace, or lifetime deal. You bought through AppSumo, or a similar platform, usually as a one-time payment rather than a recurring subscription. The reseller processed the charge and runs its own refund process, on its own published timeline, separate from whatever the underlying vendor's subscribers get.

If you're not sure which of the three you're in, check your bank or card statement first. The name on the charge tells you who to contact before any policy page does.

Why does Apple or Google handle the refund instead of the AI company?

This is the single most useful thing in this post, and the thing people get wrong most often: assuming that because they use ChatGPT, or Claude, or Perplexity, that company can always refund them.

Anthropic's own help center is explicit about it. For a subscription bought inside the iOS app: "If you paid for your plan on Claude for iOS, this means your subscription was purchased through the Apple App Store. Apple processed this payment, so only Apple can review and issue a refund—our Support team can't access or refund App Store charges." (support.claude.com, accessed 3 September 2026.)

OpenAI's help center draws the identical line for ChatGPT: "For subscriptions made through Apple Subscriptions, cancellations and refunds must be requested directly from Apple." (help.openai.com, accessed 3 September 2026.) Google Play explains its side of the same split more broadly, for every app on the platform, not just AI tools: "Most apps on the Play Store are made by third-party developers, not by Google. The developer can help with purchase issues and can process refunds pursuant to its policies and applicable laws." (support.google.com, accessed 3 September 2026.)

What do the major AI vendors actually publish, side by side?

Here's how five vendors' own current pages compare, read directly rather than summarized secondhand.

A few things worth pulling out of that table. OpenAI's help center says accidental charges are "generally eligible for a refund if you contact us within 14 days of the charge." That reads like a window, but it is framed as a courtesy for mistaken purchases rather than a blanket guarantee, and processing itself takes 5–7 business days for a web subscription or 10 business days if you paid through Google Play. Anthropic's contract language is stricter by default: "Except as expressly provided in our Consumer Terms of Service or where required by law, all payments are non-refundable." An EEA/UK carve-out and a support-ticket process sit on top of that for everything else. Perplexity is the shortest window in this table by a wide margin, and says so plainly: "Our refund policies vary based on subscription type, regional laws, and account status." GitHub Copilot doesn't publish a general refund guarantee at all: "You can cancel your Copilot plan at any time. The cancellation will take effect at the end of your current billing cycle." A prorated refund is reserved for the specific case of your personal plan being auto-cancelled because your employer added you to a company seat.

None of that means one vendor is more honest than another. It means each one decided its own policy, and none of those policies transfer to a different company just because both happen to sell an AI subscription.

Does your country give you a refund right the vendor doesn't publish?

Sometimes, and this is the part where a confident number would be doing you a disservice. Refund policies you read on a company's page are contractual promises. Consumer-protection law is a separate, jurisdiction-specific floor underneath that contract, and it varies by country, and inside some countries by how you paid.

Apple states this without picking a number: "Refund eligibility might vary by country or region... In countries and regions with consumer law protections, users retain their rights under these protections." Several AI vendors have independently chosen to publish region-specific windows that appear to track exactly this kind of local rule — OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity all separately carve out roughly 14 days for EU, UK and Turkey purchases, and OpenAI and Perplexity separately carve out 7 days for Korea. The fact that three unrelated companies converged on similar numbers for the same regions is a strong hint that a real underlying right exists there. It is not a reason for a blog post to tell a reader in a different country that the same number applies to them.

The honest move, if a vendor's own policy says no and you believe your country's law says otherwise, is to check that country's own consumer-protection authority or a local consumer-rights organization, not a blog post. If you paid by card and the vendor genuinely refuses a request you believe is valid, a chargeback through your bank is a real fallback, but treat it as the last step, not the first: several vendors state plainly that they cannot process a refund while a dispute is open, so filing both at once can leave you with neither.

What if you bought through AppSumo or another marketplace?

Then the marketplace's terms govern the refund, and the underlying AI company mostly falls out of the conversation. AppSumo's own refund policy page states it plainly: "The Refund policy for any refundable product sale is a full refund of the purchase price within the timeframe stated on the deal page (ex: 30 days, 60 days)." That's a range, not a fixed number — you have to check the specific deal page a purchase was made from. AppSumo's separate "We Got Your Back" guarantee adds: "Most products listed on AppSumo's Marketplace are fully-refundable for any reason within 60 days of purchase under our 60-day money-back guarantee." Extended protection applies on top of that if the underlying tool later shuts down (both pages last updated 31 August 2026, accessed 3 September 2026).

Prompt Architects sold a lifetime deal through AppSumo, and that listing has since sold out — see our roundup of what AppSumo buyers actually said about it and our tier-by-tier comparison of both lifetime offers for the specifics. Our own terms describe the split the same way AppSumo does, from the other side: "Purchases made through third-party marketplaces (for example, AppSumo) are governed by that marketplace's own refund policy, not this one." If you bought through AppSumo, AppSumo is who processes your refund, not us, and that's true of every AI product sold the same way, not just ours.

What is Prompt Architects' own refund policy?

14 days, on every paid plan, for a Stripe purchase made directly through us. Our terms of service state it in the same sentence twice, once as the guarantee and once as the boundary: "We offer a 14-day money-back guarantee on first-time paid purchases. Request a refund within 14 days of the initial charge and we will refund it in full." It also states: "Outside the 14-day window, refunds are not provided for partial billing periods unless required by law." Our pricing page's own FAQ repeats the number in plainer language: "Yes, we offer a 14-day money-back guarantee on all paid plans. No questions asked." (All three pages read live on 3 September 2026.)

That's the current number. It moved once this year, from a shorter window to this one, which is exactly why this post tells you to check a live page rather than trust any article, including our own pricing explainer or founder's review, for the number itself. If you're weighing whether to ask for a refund versus just not renewing, our subscription audit walks through checking whether you're actually using a tool before you decide either way.

A refund request that actually works

Most rejected refund requests fail for a boring reason: the vendor's support team can't quickly verify who you are, what you paid, or when. Give them everything up front.

Before you write anything, gather: the email address on the account, the exact plan and billing period, the purchase date and amount from your receipt or bank statement, which platform you paid through (the vendor's own site, Apple, Google Play, or AppSumo), and a plain, honest reason. You don't need a dramatic reason. "I signed up expecting X and it does Y" or "I forgot to cancel before renewal and haven't used it since" are both fine, and both are true reasons people get refunded every day precisely because they're specific and checkable.

Subject: Refund request — [account email]

Account email: [the address you signed up with]
Product / plan: [e.g., Pro, monthly]
Purchase date: [date from your receipt]
Amount charged: [$X.XX]
Platform: [company website / Apple App Store / Google Play / AppSumo]
Reason: [one or two honest sentences]

I understand refund eligibility depends on your published policy and how
long ago I was charged. Could you confirm whether this charge qualifies,
and if so, process the refund to my original payment method?

Send that to the right place: the vendor's own support channel for a direct purchase, Apple's or Google's refund flow for an app-store purchase, and the reseller's support for a marketplace or lifetime deal. Do it inside the window the vendor actually publishes, since every vendor in this post treats "outside the window" as close to a hard no regardless of how reasonable the request is. A specific, verifiable, on-time request is the version of this that works, on any of the vendors above, including us.