Refund & Cancellation Policy

Last updated 11 August 2026

1. What this policy covers

This page is about what you pay us: your lemon.gallery subscription, the add-ons on it, the pay-as-you-go usage it can run up, and one-off purchases like a LemonCompress licence.

It is not about what your clients pay you. As our Terms say (section 4), you set your own refund policy with your clients and issue those refunds yourself from inside the app. If a client of yours wants their money back for a shoot, a print or a gallery purchase, that is between you and them — please don't send them here.

2. The free plan

The free plan is free, needs no card, and has nothing to refund. You can stay on it indefinitely. On the free plan we take a small percentage fee from sales you make through the platform; section 8 covers what happens to that fee when you refund a client.

3. Cancelling a paid plan

Cancel any time from Account → Billing → Manage subscription. Cancelling means:

• Your plan stays live until the end of the period you've already paid for — the billing page shows you that date.
• The plan doesn't renew, so there's no further subscription charge.
• Pay-as-you-go usage you'd already run up is a separate thing and can still be invoiced after you cancel. Section 6 explains that properly, because it's the part people get caught by.
• At that date the account drops to the free plan. It isn't closed and your work isn't deleted.
• We don't normally refund the unused part of a period. Section 7 covers the times we do.

If dropping to the free plan puts you over its storage allowance, nothing is deleted — but you won't be able to upload anything new until you're back under the limit or back on a paid plan. The same applies to features your new tier doesn't include: they stop being available, the data behind them stays.

4. Monthly and annual plans, and switching

Monthly plans bill a month ahead and renew until you cancel. Annual plans bill a year ahead at a discount and renew the same way. That discount is the trade for committing up front, so cancelling an annual plan part-way through stops the renewal but does not, by default, refund the remaining months. If you know you might not stay a year, take the monthly plan.

Switching plans mid-period is handled by Stripe's proration, and the two directions behave differently:

• Upgrading invoices the difference straight away, so the card is charged at the moment you switch rather than at the next renewal.
• Downgrading produces a credit on your Stripe customer balance, which is automatically applied against future invoices. It is not paid back to your card. On a monthly plan you'll see it used within weeks; on an annual plan it may sit there until the next annual invoice, which could be most of a year away. Worth knowing before you downgrade an annual plan expecting money back.

5. Add-ons, tool trials and one-off licences

Add-ons (extra storage, extra connected sites, SMS, marketing volume, individual tools) follow the same rule as the plan they sit on: cancel any time, they run to the end of the period you've paid for, no partial refund by default. Individual tool add-ons start with a free trial that needs no card — cancel before it ends and you are never charged at all.

AI credit top-ups are consumed as you use them, so an unused balance stays on your account rather than expiring, but spent credit can't be refunded.

LemonCompress is sold outside the subscription, as a licence rather than a plan. You can pay £120 once, or take it as ten monthly instalments of £12 which stop on their own after the tenth — the instalments are a way to spread the same £120, not an ongoing subscription, and there is nothing to remember to cancel. Because it's a licence to software you then have, we don't refund it once it's been issued and used, except where section 7 or your legal rights apply. If you're part-way through instalments and something has gone wrong, talk to us before you stop paying — section 13.

6. Pay-as-you-go usage

Some work is metered rather than included: AI beyond your plan's monthly allowance, search-rank checks, journalist and contact lookups, and AI photo-edit operations. Here is exactly how that behaves, because it is the one part of the billing that can surprise you.

• It's charged at what it costs us plus a small margin. AI overage is billed at the real provider cost of the request, converted to pounds, plus 20%. We're not marking it up to make a business of it; the margin covers the card fees and the plumbing.
• It's invoiced after the work happens, not before. Usage accumulates and is swept onto a Stripe invoice, so the charge lands after you've had the thing you paid for.
• Small balances wait. We don't invoice a sub-£1 balance — it costs more in card fees and confusion than it earns. So a small amount can sit unbilled and then land weeks later, once it's grown to something worth charging for.
• Cancelling the plan doesn't erase it. Usage you ran up before cancelling can still be invoiced after your plan has ended. That's money for work already done, not a renewal, and it's why section 3 says the plan won't charge again rather than that nothing will.
• Unattended jobs never spend into it. Background and scheduled AI work — automations, cron jobs, bulk runs — stops when your included allowance is gone rather than tipping you into a chargeable balance. Nobody is sitting there to accept that bill, so we don't send one. Only work you actually asked for, while you're there, can go into overage.
• It isn't refundable as a rule, because the work is genuinely done — the model ran, the lookup happened, the edit was produced. But if a charge looks wrong, ask us: every metered event is logged with what it was and when, and we'll go through the log with you and refund anything that shouldn't be there.

7. When we do refund

We'd rather fix it than argue about it. We'll refund where:

• You were charged twice, or charged a plan fee after cancelling.
• You were charged the wrong amount, or for something you didn't buy.
• You paid for a period during which the service was substantially unavailable through our fault.
• Metered usage was billed in error — see section 6.
• The law requires it — including the rights in section 12, which nothing on this page takes away.

Refunds go back to the card or account you paid from. Card refunds are processed by Stripe and usually land within 5–10 working days, though the final timing is your bank's, not ours.

8. Platform fees when you refund a client

This one is about the fee we take from sales you make through the platform, and it follows the refund rather than sitting outside it:

• Refund a sale in full and the whole platform fee comes back to you.
• Refund part of a sale and the fee comes back in the same proportion — refund half, get half the fee back. We don't keep the full fee on a partial refund.
• If you've already been paid out when you issue the refund, the money comes out of your Stripe balance. If that balance is empty or too small, it can go negative and Stripe recovers it from your next takings or, failing that, from your bank account. That's Stripe's mechanism, not a charge from us, but it's worth knowing before you refund a big order at the end of a quiet month.
• If Stripe refuses the refund — usually because the original charge is too old, has already been refunded, or is caught up in a dispute — we'll tell you rather than let it fail quietly, and you'll need to settle it with your client directly.

9. If a payment fails

We don't close your account the moment a renewal fails, and we don't take your plan away while the card is being sorted out. Stripe retries automatically over the following days and we email you so you can update your card. During those retries your plan keeps working exactly as it did — full features, nothing switched off.

One thing does stop straight away: individual tool add-ons bought à la carte. When one of those goes into retry it is treated as cancelled, so that tool becomes unavailable immediately even though your plan hasn't. Update the card and it comes back; the data behind it is untouched in the meantime.

If the payment never clears, the subscription ends and the account moves to the free plan — again, without deleting your work.

10. Price changes

Prices can change. When they do, the change only ever applies from your next renewal — never to a period you've already paid for, and never mid-year on an annual plan. We'll tell you at least 30 days before a renewal at a new price, by email, so you have time to cancel first if you don't want it. If you carry on past that renewal, that's the new price accepted.

11. Closing your account isn't the same as cancelling

Two different buttons, two different outcomes, and it's worth being clear which one you want.

Cancelling stops the billing and leaves everything else alone until the paid period runs out. Closing the account is the permanent one: it cancels the subscription immediately rather than at the end of the period, with no refund of the time you'd already paid for, takes every published gallery offline that same moment so your clients' links stop working, and irreversibly erases your account details and every connected credential.

If all you want is for the billing to stop, cancel — don't close. You'll keep the paid period you bought, your galleries stay up, and the account simply drops to the free plan at the end. What happens to your data after closure is set out in our Data Processing Agreement and Privacy Policy.

12. Your legal cancellation rights

If you are a consumer in the UK — buying mainly for yourself rather than for your business — you normally have 14 days to cancel a contract made online and get your money back. If you want to use that right, email us within 14 days of subscribing and we'll deal with it; you don't need a particular form of words.

Because the software is available to use immediately, you may have used some of it before cancelling. In principle the law lets a trader deduct a proportionate amount for that, but only where the consumer expressly asked for supply to begin inside the cancellation period, and our sign-up flow doesn't currently ask you for that. So we won't assert a deduction we haven't properly set up — if we ever think one is fair, we'll raise it with you rather than take it.

Most studios subscribe for their business, and the consumer rules are aimed at people buying outside their trade. But the line isn't as neat as it sounds — plenty of our customers are sole traders, and whether you fall on the consumer side depends on your circumstances, not on which box you ticked at sign-up. So rather than telling you the right doesn't apply: if you think you bought as a consumer, tell us and we'll look at it properly. Nothing on this page limits any right you have under UK consumer law.

We don't offer a blanket money-back guarantee, and that's deliberate rather than mean: the free plan is permanent, and a first paid plan comes with a trial where one is running, so you can deliver real client galleries and run real bookings before you ever pay us. If you want to know whether it fits, the honest answer is to use it first.

13. How to ask

Email hello@lemon.gallery from the address on your account, tell us what happened and roughly when, and we'll come back to you. If something has been charged that you don't recognise, please ask us before raising a chargeback with your bank — not because there's any penalty for doing it, but because a chargeback takes weeks to work through your bank and Stripe, and we can usually just refund you. Raising one is your right and we won't hold it against your account.

14. Changes

We may update this policy; the version that applies to a payment is the one published when you made it. Material changes will be notified in-app or by email.