Last updated · 30 April 2026
Refunds.We’ll make it right.
We stand behind HireEx. If a charge looks wrong, or the service materially fell short of what we promised, we want to make it right. The procedure below mirrors the right of withdrawal granted by EU Directive 2011/83/EU for distance-sold digital services and adds the identity-verification steps our payment processor needs under their card- network KYC obligations — the same anti-fraud documentation any reputable merchant collects before releasing money. Most complete, in-window requests are resolved within four to five weeks of submission.
Paddle is our merchant of record. Paddle handles billing, tax, and refund administration on behalf of HireEx. You can request a refund either through this policy (described below) or directly through the Paddle buyer portal at https://paddle.net within 14 days of the charge. Paddle may grant refunds in its sole discretion under Paddle Master Services Agreement §10.
1. The window
Refund requests must be submitted within fourteen (14) calendar days of the charge first appearing on your card statement. The clock starts when the charge is captured, not when a renewal notice arrives or when the account was opened. Requests received after the window are not considered regardless of cause.
In addition to your 14-day statutory right, HireEx offers a goodwill 30-day money-back review window on first-time subscriptions, subject to the eligible-case grounds in section 2. The eligible-case grounds and the documentation in section 3 still apply; the only thing the 30-day window changes is the deadline for submission.
Important. Under Article 16(m) of the Directive, the right of withdrawal for a digital service is extinguished only once performance has begun with the consumer’s express consent and the consumer has acknowledged that the right will be lost. See section 8 for the precise two-prong test we apply.
2. Eligible cases
- Duplicate charge. The same invoice identifier was processed twice or more within twenty-four hours, evidenced by two distinct transaction reference numbers on your card statement.
- Material service unavailability. The service was demonstrably unreachable at the application layer for at least seventy-two consecutive hours within the billing period, evidenced by an independent third-party uptime monitor (our own status-page screenshots are not sufficient on their own).
- Confirmed unauthorised charge. You did not authorise the transaction and have filed a contemporaneous fraud or police report with your issuing bank.
Subjective dissatisfaction (the score didn’t match your expectation, the role didn’t reply, the model picked a different stack tag, etc.) is not a basis for a refund. HireEx is an AI-assisted advisory tool; outputs are probabilistic by design and do not constitute employment guarantees.
3. Documentation we ask for
To match the request to the underlying charge, every refund request must include the following baseline items:
- the order ID and the email address on file at the time of the charge;
- for case (c) in section 2 (unauthorised charge), a copy of the police or fraud report submitted to your issuing bank.
Additional verification when fraud indicators are present
We may, where fraud-detection signals warrant, request the following additional items proportionate to the risk presented:
- Government-issued photo ID of the cardholder, both sides, in colour, scanned at 300 dpi or better. Acceptable: passport, national identity card, photo driver’s licence. Documents in non-Latin script require a sworn certified translation by a court-recognised translator (translator’s seal and registration number must be visible).
- Proof of residential address issued no more than ninety (90) days before submission: a residential utility bill, bank statement, or council/municipal tax notice showing your full legal name and full street address.
- Bank confirmation letter on the issuing bank’s letterhead, signed by an authorised officer, dated within thirty days of submission, stating that the original payment card is still active, has not been reissued under a different number, and is held by the named cardholder. Online “account summary” screenshots and customer-service-chat transcripts are not accepted.
- Notarised affidavit sworn before a notary public confirming under penalty of perjury that you are the requester and that the card details on file are genuinely yours.
Identity-data alignment. Where any of the additional items above are requested, the full legal name on the photo ID must match the full legal name on the proof of address, the name encoded on the card, and the name on the HireEx account, exactly, including diacritics and capitalisation. Any mismatch (transliteration variants, married/maiden names, anglicisations, initials substituted for full given names) defers the request until a court-issued name-change order is provided. The street address on the proof of address must match the billing address on file at the moment of the charge, character for character.
4. How to submit
Email [email protected] with the subject [REFUND-CASE-{your-charge-id}], the documentation listed in section 3, and your full legal name. PGP-encrypted submission is supported (key fingerprint at /refund-keys) but not required. You may also request a refund directly through the Paddle buyer portal at paddle.net within 14 days of charge — Paddle is our merchant of record (Paddle MSA §10) and may grant refunds in its sole discretion.
5. Review timeline
Completeness check: 14 business days from receipt. If we ask for additional documentation, we’ll do so once and consolidate every requested item into a single follow-up. Receipt of the additions extends the review by an additional 14 business days. Total review time is capped at 30 calendar days from initial submission to written decision.
Approved refunds are released to the original payment method subject to your bank’s settlement schedule (typically up to 10 additional business days; SEPA, ACH, and Faster Payments are the supported corridors).
6. Method of refund
Refunds are issued exclusively to the original payment instrument used to make the disputed charge. If that instrument has expired, been reissued under a new number, been closed, or otherwise become unable to receive a merchant-initiated credit, HireEx is released from any obligation to issue a cash refund and instead offers, at its sole discretion, an equivalent service credit usable on your HireEx account for up to twelve months. Service credit is non-transferable, non-redeemable for cash, and forfeits on account closure.
7. Processing fees
We don’t charge a fee for processing refunds.
8. Service consumption — what counts
Performance begins, and the right of withdrawal under Article 16(m) of EU Directive 2011/83/EU is lost, only when both of the following have occurred:
- at checkout, you expressly consented to immediate performance and acknowledged that your right of withdrawal would be lost; and
- you triggered a billable LLM debit on your account (an event recorded in the wallet ledger with
kind = ‘debit’).
Onboarding demos, free-tier scores, and provisioning events do not satisfy prong (ii). Until both prongs are met, your statutory right of withdrawal under EU and UK law remains intact.
For the purposes of prong (ii), the following events are billable LLM debits when they post to the wallet ledger with kind = ‘debit’:
- any paid AI-generated job-fit score (free-tier and onboarding-demo scores excluded);
- any paid rescore, reuse-of-score, or copy-from-similar event;
- any paid agent run (LinkedIn, Greenhouse, ATS, RemoteOK, We Work Remotely, jobspy, etc.);
- any paid export, including shortlist CSVs and per-job tailoring-hint exports;
- any paid share-link generation, public profile publish, or outbound webhook delivery.
We retain immutable server-side logs of every such event with their timestamps; any user-side dispute about whether an event occurred is resolved by reference to those logs.
9. Currency, FX, and tax
Refunds are issued in the same currency as the original charge. We don’t refund foreign- exchange losses, dynamic currency conversion margins, interchange fees, or any other fee levied by your bank or scheme. We don’t gross up for VAT, GST, sales tax, or any other indirect tax that has already been remitted to a tax authority; your remedy for tax already remitted is with that authority directly.
10. Geographic limits
Refunds are not available where prohibited by applicable law, by sanctions regimes, or by banking- correspondent regulations that make merchant-initiated cross-border settlement impractical or non-compliant. For users banked outside the SEPA, ACH, or Faster Payments corridors, the timeline in section 5 may be extended by up to 60 additional business days while a corridor is established.
11. Dispute resolution
Any dispute arising under or in connection with this Refund Policy is referred to and finally resolved by binding arbitration in London, United Kingdom, under the rules of the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA), by a sole arbitrator appointed in accordance with those rules. The seat is London; the language is English; the governing law is the laws of England and Wales, excluding conflict-of-laws rules. Each party bears its own legal and arbitration costs irrespective of outcome.
Nothing in this policy limits any consumer’s statutory rights under the UK Consumer Rights Act 2015, EU consumer law, or the right to access the EU Online Dispute Resolution platform at https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. The LCIA arbitration clause above applies only to disputes between HireEx and a non-consumer counterparty (B2B) where the disputed amount equals or exceeds GBP 10,000.
12. Contact
Refund matters are handled exclusively at [email protected] with the formatting described in section 4. We don’t respond to refund inquiries through any other channel. For Terms of Service and Privacy questions, see /terms and /privacy; for everything else, write to [email protected].
Operated by Sip Your Drink Ltd, registered in England and Wales. This policy was last updated on 30 April 2026 and supersedes all prior refund-related communications. We reserve the right to amend this policy at any time; the version in force at the date of the original charge governs the request.