Payments, cancellation and refunds

PixlNova sells services: design, web and mobile engineering, SaaS and AI product work, and monthly marketing or creative retainers. Every engagement starts with a written scope that names what is included and what is explicitly excluded, and no invoice is raised before that scope is agreed.

Work is then built in milestones. Each milestone ends in something you can open and use, and payment follows acceptance of it. That is why the cancellation right below is a settlement rather than a reversal — at any point in the project, the money paid and the work delivered are already close to level.

A thirty-day money-back clause on a project of this kind would be unenforceable in one direction and unfair in the other. Thirty days into a build, a client is usually running accepted software in their own accounts, from commits in their own repository. Undoing that is not possible, and paying nothing for it is not reasonable.

Where money genuinely should come back — a duplicate payment, an amount taken for work never started, a settlement that lands in your favour — it comes back, to the instrument that paid, under section 10. That is a real remedy applied to real situations rather than a marketing promise applied to none.

Five commitments do the work that a refund window pretends to do. Each is published on the pricing page and each is verifiable by you within the first week of the project.

PixlNova is a trading name. The contracting party is a sole proprietorship operated by the proprietor named above, from Tamil Nadu, India, working to Indian Standard Time (UTC+5:30). It is one individual, not a company: there is no separate corporate entity standing between you and the person who writes the code.

The name that appears on your card or bank statement is the business name held on record by the payment gateway, which is the name in the block above. If a statement descriptor does not match it, the payment was not to PixlNova.

GST registration, Udyam (MSME) registration and a business current account are in progress. Until each completes, the identity block on this page is the authoritative statement of status, and it is re-checked every time this document is reviewed. Nothing anywhere on this site should be read as claiming a registration that has not been granted.

For as long as the block above records PixlNova as not registered under GST: no GST is charged on any invoice; no GSTIN is displayed on an invoice, this website, a proposal or an email, because displaying a registration number you do not hold is an offence under section 32 of the CGST Act; and the document you receive is titled exactly as that block states. It is not titled Tax Invoice, and no document from PixlNova will be while that remains the position.

The price you are quoted is the amount payable. Nothing is added on top at invoice time. The corollary is that there is no tax component on the document, so there is no input tax credit to claim against it.

If your process requires a GSTIN on the supplier record before a purchase order can be raised, say so before the scope is agreed rather than at the point of invoicing. It is a fixable problem at the start and an awkward one at the end.

GST will then apply, at the rate in force, to invoices raised on or after the effective date of registration. You will be told before the first such invoice reaches you, and the scope document will be amended to record it. Invoices already raised are not re-issued, and a quoted price is not silently increased — the change is a line you see and agree, not a percentage that appears.

No Indian GST is charged to you. Any tax, duty, levy or withholding your own jurisdiction imposes on the payment is yours to assess and handle.

If you are required to withhold tax at source, the invoice is not settled by the net amount that arrives. The withheld balance remains payable unless the scope document expressly says the price is inclusive of withholding, and a withholding certificate is not a substitute for payment unless the scope says it is.

The first stage of every engagement produces a written scope: what is being built, what is explicitly not, the milestones, and a fixed number against them. No invoice exists before that document is agreed, and nothing outside it is started without a new agreed line.

Consent to be charged is recorded from two affirmative acts by you: agreeing the scope in writing, and paying a specific invoice for a specific amount. It is never inferred from silence, never collected by a pre-ticked checkbox, and never carried across from a previous project or a previous month.

This is why there is no cancellation flow to find and no subscription to remember to stop. Stopping a retainer is not paying the next invoice, and telling the studio so.

The figures on the pricing page, and anything the guided assistant at /chat repeats from them, describe a typical scope at that tier. They are an indication to help you judge whether a conversation is worth having. The number that binds either party is the one in the scope document you agree.

Where your business is established — your billing address and place of business — not where the website happened to be viewed from, and not which figure you saw first. The site shows one currency based on where the visitor appears to be, but that display is a convenience, not a price commitment.

The scope document names the currency and the amounts. Neither changes mid-project because an exchange rate moved, in either direction. A project quoted in INR is invoiced and settled in INR to its end, and the same for USD.

Cross-border card fees, your card issuer's currency conversion markup, and intermediary bank charges on a wire are costs between you and your bank. PixlNova has no visibility of them and cannot waive them.

An invoice is settled when the stated amount arrives. If your bank's charges are deducted in transit, the shortfall is still outstanding — so on a wire, please instruct charges to your own account.

Hosting, domains, app store developer fees, font and stock licences, model API usage and advertising spend sit in accounts you own and are billed to you directly by those providers. No margin is added, because PixlNova never touches the money.

Where a third-party cost has to be paid by the studio on your instruction, it is re-billed at cost with the receipt attached. Section 6.5 explains why those amounts cannot come back in a cancellation settlement.

Project work is billed in three shapes: a deposit before work begins, a payment on each milestone as it is accepted, and the balance at handover. The amounts, and the specific event that triggers each one, are written into the scope document before anything starts. There is no lump sum up front, and no invoice that arrives without having been described in advance.

A milestone is accepted when the deliverable has been given to you in a usable form and you have either confirmed it, or not raised a defect within the review period stated in your scope document. Two rounds of revision inside the agreed scope are included in every milestone before it is put forward for acceptance.

Only accepted milestones are invoiced. A milestone that is not accepted is reworked; it does not become payable by the passage of time alone while a defect you raised is open.

Each invoice states its own payment term. If a milestone invoice passes its due date, work on the next milestone does not start until it is settled.

Late payment does not trigger deletion, revocation or a hostage situation. Your repository is not touched, your deployments keep running in your own accounts, and everything you have already paid for stays yours. The work pauses; it is not taken away.

Marketing and retained creative work are invoiced in advance for the month ahead, because the deliverable is a defined volume of output produced across that month. This is the one exception to billing on acceptance, and section 7 sets out how a retainer month is cancelled and settled.

Payment is made through the Razorpay or Stripe payment link on an invoice raised by PixlNova, or to the bank details printed on that invoice. Nowhere else.

You may end a project engagement at any milestone boundary, at any point in the project, for any reason or none. There is no minimum term on project work, no exit fee, and no requirement that the studio agrees with your reasoning.

Amounts for milestones that have been delivered and accepted are payable in full and are not refundable. You keep those deliverables, you keep the code in your repository, and ownership of them transfers under section 9 on the same terms it would have at the end of a completed project.

A milestone that is underway has not been accepted, so it has not been invoiced. If an advance was taken against it, you choose which of two things happens, and the choice is genuinely yours:

If you do not answer within a reasonable time, the second option applies by default: the advance is returned and the partial work is not delivered. The default runs in the direction of returning your money.

The written scope, its named exclusions and the milestone plan are themselves a deliverable, produced before any build work. Where the deposit covered that stage and it has been delivered, that portion is not returned.

It is not a fee for nothing. It is a document you keep, and it is specific enough to hand to a different engineer as the basis for a quote, which is exactly what makes leaving cheap.

Amounts already paid to third parties on your instruction cannot be returned, because PixlNova does not hold them. Domain registrations, app store developer fees, font and stock licences, model API usage and advertising spend are the usual cases.

Each such cost appears on the settlement statement with its receipt. Where the thing bought is transferable — a domain, a licence seat — it is transferred to you rather than kept.

If the statement is wrong, say so with the line you dispute. Milestone acceptance is a written record and the commit history is in your own repository, so most disagreements resolve by both parties reading the same two things.

If it does not resolve that way, escalate to the grievance officer under section 10 and the Grievance Redressal policy. Raising a bank dispute instead is slower for you — see section 11.

Retainers are monthly and nothing renews by itself. Each month is invoiced and each invoice is paid as a deliberate act, so there is no mandate to cancel and no anniversary date to remember.

Email before the next month is invoiced and there is nothing further to pay. That is the whole process. You will be told the date the next invoice would otherwise be raised if you ask.

A retainer month that has been paid runs to the end of its period and is not refunded pro-rata, because the deliverable is a defined volume of output produced across the whole month rather than a daily service.

One exception, and it is the fair one: if the agreed volume for a paid month has not been produced at the point you cancel, you choose between having it delivered and having the undelivered proportion refunded.

Ad spend is never part of a retainer fee and is billed to your own advertising accounts. Cancelling the retainer does not pause campaigns running on your account — you control that, and you should switch them off yourself if that is what you want.

Content produced, campaign assets, tracking configuration and dashboards for months you paid for remain yours and stay where they are, in your accounts. Access is not revoked as leverage, and the last month's report is still issued.

An engagement may be ended by PixlNova where:

Exactly as in section 6, with one addition in your favour: any amount paid in advance for work that has not been started is returned in full, not apportioned. No cancellation fee is charged by either party in either direction.

This is a single-person studio, and the possibility that it cannot continue is a real one rather than a hypothetical to be talked around. The structure of the work is the mitigation: your code is in your repository under your account from the first commit, your infrastructure runs in accounts you own and pay for, and every delivered milestone comes with written architecture notes.

So if the studio stops, nothing of yours is held anywhere. Another engineer can pick the work up without an introduction, which is the point of building it that way.

Ending an engagement for non-payment does not reach backwards. Work you paid for and accepted stays yours, the repository is not touched, and deployments in your accounts are not interfered with. Work that has not been paid for is a separate question, and section 9 answers it.

Code is pushed to your repository, under your account, from the first commit. Infrastructure is provisioned in your own hosting, database and domain accounts, with access granted to the studio rather than the other way round. Ending an engagement changes none of that: there is no migration, no export request, and no window in which you could be locked out.

Intellectual property in a deliverable transfers to you when payment for the milestone containing it has cleared. On a completed project that is the final payment. On a cancelled engagement it is the settlement under section 6 or section 8.

What transfers is what was produced for you under this engagement: the source code written for it, the designs made for it, and the documentation written for it. The transfer is confirmed in writing, and in practice it is a formality rather than a handover, because the material is already in your accounts.

Cleared means the funds have been received and settled and are no longer capable of being reversed by you, your bank, the card issuer or the payment gateway. A payment that is later reversed — by chargeback, by gateway action, or because it failed after appearing to succeed — was never cleared, and a transfer conditional on it does not take effect.

Ownership of a deliverable that has not been paid for does not transfer, and no licence to use it in production is granted until it is.

The presence of commits in your repository is a working arrangement chosen for your benefit, not a statement about ownership. A repository is where the work is kept. It is not a record of who owns what is in it, and nothing in this policy should be read as making it one.

Open-source dependencies remain under their own licences and are not assigned to anyone by this document — they are used under those licences by both parties. Fonts, stock media and paid third-party components are licensed to you by their vendors on their own terms, and the receipts are handed over with them.

Generic tooling, internal libraries and know-how that the studio brought to the project are not assigned. You receive a perpetual, irrevocable licence to use them as they are embedded in your deliverable, which is what makes the deliverable usable without further permission.

The defect warranty is 30, 60 or 90 days depending on the plan tier in your scope document. Where an engagement is cancelled, it applies to the milestones you paid for and accepted, and runs from the settlement date.

It covers something that shipped broken. It does not cover completing what was not built, and it is not a route to having a cancelled milestone finished at no charge.

Any non-disclosure agreement, and the confidentiality terms in the scope document, continue to apply after cancellation on both sides. Your project is not written up as a case study, named in a portfolio or quoted in a testimonial without your written permission, whether or not the engagement completed.

Email from the address on the invoice, with the invoice number, the payment reference from your bank or the gateway, and one paragraph describing what happened. There is no form to complete and no ticket to open.

Your request is acknowledged and resolved within the periods published in the block above. If the decision is a refusal, you are told which clause it rests on and what evidence was considered, rather than being told no.

If you are not satisfied, escalate to the grievance officer named above. The Grievance Redressal policy sets out that route, and it is available whether or not you have a contract with the studio.

A refund returns to the instrument that made the payment and to nobody else. Not to a different card, not to a different bank account, not to a wallet, and not as studio credit against future work unless you specifically ask for that in writing.

If the original instrument has been closed, your bank will normally route the credit to the successor account. Where the gateway genuinely cannot deliver it, an alternative is arranged in writing with evidence that the receiving account belongs to the original payer.

The whole sum taken from you is refunded. The payment gateway's processing fee is not deducted from what you receive, even where the gateway does not return that fee to the studio. A refund that arrives short of the amount debited is not a refund.

PixlNova initiates the refund as soon as the amount is agreed — in practice the same working day or the next — and in no case later than the resolution period published above. You are given the gateway refund reference so you can trace it yourself.

After that, the time it takes to appear in your account belongs to the gateway and your bank, and no honest number can be published for it here. It is quick for UPI, slower for cards, and slowest for international card refunds. PixlNova cannot accelerate it and will not pretend otherwise.

A refund is made in the currency that was captured. Because rates move and banks apply their own cross-border fees on both the payment and the refund, the amount that lands may not equal the amount originally debited from your account. PixlNova returns the amount it received; the difference sits with the banks.

Records of your invoices, payments, settlements and refunds are stored in PixlNova's Supabase Postgres database in region ap-southeast-2, which is Sydney, Australia. If you are in India, that means these records are held outside India. Card, UPI and bank credentials are not among them — those remain with Razorpay and Stripe and never reach PixlNova.

The Privacy Policy sets out what is stored, for how long, and the rights you have over it.

If something about an invoice is wrong, email first. A chargeback takes weeks, is decided on documents by people who were not present, and is almost always slower for you than the studio simply sending the money back. Asking first is not a condition of anything — it is a suggestion made in your interest.

Work on the engagement pauses while the dispute is open, because the amount in question is no longer settled. PixlNova responds to the gateway with the agreed scope document, the acceptance record for the milestone in question, and the commit history — which sits in your own repository and is equally visible to you.

The response is factual. Raising a dispute is not treated as an accusation and does not end the relationship by itself.

A reversed payment is not a cleared payment. Ownership of the deliverables covered by a reversed amount does not transfer, and does not transfer later unless that amount is paid. This is the one place where a payment dispute reaches into section 9, and it is stated here so it cannot be a surprise.

If a payment appears on your card that you did not make, contact your card issuer and PixlNova at the same time. That is not a dispute between us, and the studio will cooperate with the issuer's investigation rather than contest it.

That store sells academic project packages as digital goods: source code, documentation and presentation material, delivered as files on payment. The economics are the opposite of a milestone engagement — delivery is instant and complete, and a downloaded file cannot be un-delivered.

So its policy runs on a defined review window with stated conditions, not on a cancellation settlement. That policy governs those purchases in full, and is published at projects.pixlnova.com/refund-policy. Nothing in this document changes it, extends it, or creates a right under it.

That platform connects clients with independent freelancers and holds funds in escrow until agreed release conditions are met. PixlNova's role there is the platform's, not the supplier's: the work is performed by the freelancer under an arrangement between the two of you.

Escrow release, dispute handling and refunds on that property are governed by its own published terms. This document does not apply to them.

It is decided by what you bought and where you paid, not by which page you happened to be reading. If you are unsure, the invoice states which property raised it. If the invoice is unclear, ask — you will be pointed at the right document rather than the convenient one.

The assistant on this site is a guided assistant over published content. It can find the relevant clause and point you to the right property's policy. It is not a language model answering freely, it is not a person, and nothing it says approves, refuses or varies a refund.

A brief you submit through it reaches the studio by the same route as the contact form, and a decision on money always comes from a person by email.

The version of this document is a date rather than a number, so it explains itself. The effective date states when it began to govern, and the last-reviewed date states when a person last read it and decided nothing needed to change. All three are printed at the top of this page.

A change is material if it alters when payment is taken, how a cancellation is settled, the method or the outer timing of a refund, or the list of amounts that are not refundable. A change-notice clause that does not define its own threshold means nothing, so this one does.

Material changes are published and take effect thirty days later. Everything else — wording, examples, corrections, clarifications — takes effect when it is published.

A material change does not apply to an engagement whose scope was already agreed. That engagement continues under the version in force on the date the scope was signed, and superseded versions are kept and sent to you on request.

Where this policy and your signed scope document disagree about the amounts, milestones or dates for your engagement, the scope document governs. Where this policy and the Terms of Service disagree about payment, cancellation or refunds, this policy governs.

Nothing in this document limits any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, or other applicable law that cannot be limited by agreement. Where a clause here conflicts with such a right, the right applies and the rest of this document stands.