Refund and Cancellation Policy

This policy governs Rivul Pro subscriptions. It forms part of the Terms of Service and, where they differ, this page is the more specific and wins on anything about cancellation or money.

Free Beta has nothing to refund. It takes no card and does not convert to a paid plan on its own. New accounts get a 1-day research trial (upload, search, fetch, chat); after that the editor and existing work stay, and new research ingest does not.

Billing is not switched on yet. Nothing on the site currently takes a payment. This policy is published in advance so that the terms are known before the first card is entered rather than discovered afterwards.

Pro is $19 per month, or $144 for a year paid in a single charge. The annual plan works out at $12 a month and saves $84 against paying monthly for a year. Prices are in United States dollars.

Both plans renew automatically until you cancel. A monthly plan is charged every month on the same date; an annual plan is charged once a year on the same date. The charge goes to the payment method held by Stripe, our payment processor.

The annual plan is one charge of $144, not twelve smaller ones. This is stated explicitly because the monthly-equivalent figure is the one advertised, and a renewal notice quoting the per-month number before taking the annual amount would be exactly the sort of misstatement the auto-renewal laws exist to prevent. Our renewal notices quote the amount Stripe is about to charge, taken from Stripe's own upcoming invoice so that it already reflects any discount, proration or credit on your account.

Prices exclude any tax that applies where you are. Stripe processes the payment but is not the merchant of record, so Rivul is the seller and is responsible for charging and remitting any applicable sales tax or VAT. Where tax applies it is added at checkout and shown before you confirm.

You get an email before an auto-renewal, stating the date it renews, the amount that will be charged, and how to cancel, with a link straight to billing settings.

For an annual subscription the notice goes out thirty days before the renewal date. That window is chosen to sit inside what California's Automatic Renewal Law and the Federal Trade Commission's negative-option rule require, with room to spare. For a monthly subscription the notice goes out three days before, which is not a legal requirement but is enough warning on a thirty-day cycle without turning your inbox into a permanent reminder.

The notice is sent once per renewal. It is queued against the specific renewal date it concerns, so a retry cannot turn one legally required notice into three support tickets, and a send that fails is picked up again rather than being silently marked as delivered.

Open billing settings in the app and cancel there. It is on the same page you subscribed from, it takes two clicks, and it does not route you through a retention offer, a survey, a phone call or an email to support. That is deliberate: the Federal Trade Commission's negative-option rule and California's Automatic Renewal Law both require cancellation to be at least as easy as signing up, and the honest way to meet that is to make it easier.

Cancelling stops the next charge. It does not end your access immediately: Pro runs to the end of the period you have already paid for, and then the account moves to Free Beta. If you cancel an annual plan in month two, you keep Pro for the remaining ten months.

The same page lets you switch between monthly and annual billing, update your card, and download every past invoice. If you cannot reach it, write to support@rivul.ai and we will cancel it for you; being unable to reach the cancel button is never a reason you stay subscribed.

Deleting the account cancels the subscription immediately and stops further charges. It does not by itself refund the unused part of the current period; that follows the monthly and annual rules above. If a charge arrives after the account is gone, write to support@rivul.ai and it will be refunded in full.

Cancelling a monthly plan stops the next charge and you keep Pro until the month you paid for runs out. Because the next charge never happens, there is normally nothing to refund.

We do not refund a partial month as a matter of course, because you had the allowance for the month you paid for and a month is a short commitment. There is no minimum term and no cancellation fee.

We will refund a monthly charge in full where you were charged after cancelling, where a fault in Rivul left the AI features unusable for a material part of the period, where you were charged twice for the same period, or where you subscribed by mistake and have not used the Pro allowance. Ask at support@rivul.ai and say which of those it is.

The annual plan is treated differently from the monthly one, for the obvious reason: it is a single charge covering a year, and a year is long enough that circumstances change. Applying the monthly rule to it would mean someone who cancelled in week three had bought eleven months they did not want.

Within thirty days of the annual charge, whether it is a first purchase or a renewal, you can have a full refund on request. Not a pro-rata refund, the whole amount. Ask at support@rivul.ai. If a renewal charge caught you out despite the thirty-day advance notice, this is the case that covers it.

After thirty days, we will refund the unused whole months of an annual term on request, calculated from the end of the month in which you ask, less the months you have used. We are not obliged to do this and it is not a legal right; it is the policy because holding onto money for ten months of a service someone has stopped using is not a business we want.

If we terminate your account for a reason other than a breach by you, or if Rivul is discontinued, the unused portion of an annual term is refunded pro rata without you having to ask.

If you are a consumer in the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you have a statutory right to withdraw from a distance contract for digital services within fourteen days of entering it, and this policy does not reduce that right.

Rivul honours the fourteen-day withdrawal right and refunds in full within it, including where you have already used the service during those fourteen days. We do not ask you to waive the right in order to get immediate access, and we do not deduct for use.

The refund windows in the sections above are additional to this and are more generous than it, so in practice the annual thirty-day window is the one you would use.

If a renewal charge fails, Stripe retries the card over several days and emails you about it. Your account keeps Pro during that period rather than being cut off on the first decline, because a bank declining a perfectly good card is common and punishing you for it would be absurd.

If the retries are exhausted without a successful payment, the subscription ends and the account returns to Free Beta. Nothing you have written is deleted, and you can subscribe again at any time.

You are not charged for a period you were not given, and a failed charge is not a debt we pursue.

Nothing is taken away. This is the part people worry about and the answer is short: cancelling, letting a subscription lapse, or dropping to Free Beta does not delete or lock a single thing you have written or uploaded.

Your documents, the PDFs already in your library, your annotations, your references and your saved searches all stay exactly as they are. You can keep reading and deleting your own PDFs, editing citations, and exporting your own manuscript, including your bibliography as LaTeX, BibTeX and Word. There is no read-only mode, no export window that closes, and no period after which your papers become inaccessible.

What you lose after the 1-day research trial or a paid cancel is the ability to add new research: upload a new PDF, import BibTeX or Zotero, fetch a new open-access PDF, search scholarly indexes, refresh OpenAlex counts, re-extract or OCR, and research chat. Those return on Pro or Ultimate. Free still meters AI actions for the editor; the current figures are on the pricing page.

We think an export window would be the wrong promise to make, so we have not made one. Your work is not the hostage.

If you think a charge is wrong, email support@rivul.ai before disputing it with your bank. We would rather refund you than pay a dispute fee to argue about it, and a refund reaches you in days where a chargeback takes weeks.

Refunds are issued to the original payment method through Stripe. How quickly it appears is up to your bank, and is usually five to ten business days.

We may decline a refund and suspend an account where a refund request is part of a pattern of abuse, such as repeatedly subscribing and refunding to use the Pro allowance for free. That is the only circumstance in which a refund request is refused for a reason other than the windows above.

We may update this policy, and the version in force is the one published on the date you were charged. A change that reduces your rights under it will be emailed to subscribers at least thirty days beforehand and will not apply retroactively to a charge already made.

Every request under this policy, and any question about a charge, goes to support@rivul.ai. Please include the email address on the account and roughly when the charge was made.