Subscription and cancellation

Everything on this page is meant to be read before you pay rather than found afterwards. That is not a courtesy: a subscription that renews without the buyer having understood it is how you end up with chargebacks, and a chargeback costs more than the refund would have.

The short version


It renews on its own	Monthly plans renew every month, annual plans every year, at the price you signed up at, until you cancel.
What you are charged	$6 a month, or $60 a year — plus VAT or sales tax where it applies, calculated at checkout.
How to stop it	Two clicks in the billing portal. No email, no form, no retention conversation.
When it stops working	At the end of the period you already paid for — never in the middle of one.
Trials never turn into a charge	A trial has no card attached. Nothing can bill you unless you go through checkout yourself.

Auto-renewal

Your subscription renews automatically at the end of every billing period. Stripe charges the card on file on the renewal date, at the price shown on Pricing when you subscribed, and emails you a receipt.

If we ever change the price of a plan you are on, you get at least 30 days’ notice by email before a renewal at the new price, and you can cancel before it applies. A price change never touches a period you have already paid for.

The current price is introductory, and yours is fixed

$6 a month and $60 a year are an introductory price. The intention is to raise it to $9 and $90 once there are enough subscribers to justify it. This is stated here, and on Pricing, rather than kept as a plan — an increase nobody was warned about reads as a bait-and-switch even when it is not.

If you are already subscribed when it changes, you keep the price you signed up at, for as long as that subscription stays active. That is a term of this agreement and not a goodwill gesture, and it is worth knowing why it is safe to promise: a Stripe subscription is attached to the price it was created against. Raising the price means creating a new one for new subscribers. Yours is unaffected by us doing nothing at all, which is a far better guarantee than one that depends on somebody remembering to apply a discount.

The exception, and it is the ordinary one: if you cancel and subscribe again later, you subscribe at whatever the price is then. The old rate goes with the old subscription.

Buying it once instead

There is also a lifetime licence — one payment of $250, no renewal, every future version, capped at 250 buyers in total. What follows applies to it instead of most of this page:


It does not renew	It is a single payment. There is nothing to cancel and no card kept on file for it.
It does not expire	The licence carries no end date. The 72-hour offline grace window and the 3-machine limit work exactly as they do on a subscription.
The cap is real	250 is counted by the licence server, and checkout refuses once they are gone rather than taking the payment. The number shown on Pricing is that count, not a marketing figure.
Withdrawal still applies	The 14-day right below, and the refund policy, cover it the same way.

“Lifetime” means the lifetime of the product, not a promise about how long we will exist. That is precisely why the tier is capped: 250 at $ 250 is money that funds the licence server for years up front, and an uncapped one-time price would be support promised with no revenue behind it.

It would be easy to write a reassuring sentence here about what happens to a lifetime licence if Dispatch is discontinued. We are not going to, because no such commitment has been made yet and inventing one on a page next to a buy button is the worst available option. The honest position: a lifetime licence depends on the same licence server a subscription does, so the 72-hour offline grace window is currently the whole of your protection if it goes dark permanently. The obvious thing to commit to is a final build with the gate switched off, published if the product is ever wound down — which is cheap to promise and would make this tier materially safer to buy.

TODOwhether a wind-down commitment is offered on a lifetime licence — decide it before this tier goes on sale, and state it here either way

Cancelling

Open the billing portal and cancel. You can reach it from the activation screen inside Dispatch, and from your account on this site. It is Stripe’s own portal, so cancelling does not depend on us being awake.

You do not need to email anybody, and there is nothing you have to say to a person first. If you find yourself needing to write to us to stop paying, something has broken — tell us and we will treat it as a bug.

What happens next:

The subscription is marked to end at the end of the current period. You keep working.
On the last day, Stripe closes it and tells our licence server.
The licence stops being valid. At the next launch check Dispatch stops opening — and within the 72-hour offline grace window, at the latest, on a machine that has been offline.
Your key stays in our records. Subscribe again later and the same key starts working again — you do not get a new one and do not have to re-enter anything.

Nothing on your machine is deleted. Workspaces, documents and settings are files in your user-data folder and stay exactly where they are.

Two pieces of slack that are deliberate

Both of these are in the code, and both exist because the alternative is a support email that should never have been sent.

Two days past the period end. Your entitlement is set to the period end plus 48 hours. Renewals land when Stripe gets round to them, and a subscription that renews at 03:00 should not lock you out at 02:59.
A failed payment does not lock you out immediately. If a card bounces, Stripe spends the rest of the period you already paid for retrying it. You keep working during that window, and the licence lapses when the paid period actually runs out — not the hour the payment failed.

The trial

14 days, no card, issued once per email address and once per machine.

It does not convert. It does not ask for a card at the start and quietly charge you at the end, because there is no card to charge — a trial and a subscription are two different things in our database and nothing joins them without you going through checkout.

When it runs out, Dispatch stops opening. If you subscribe afterwards, the trial licence is upgraded in place: same key, still typed into your app, now paid.

Your right to withdraw — EU and UK consumers

If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, you normally have 14 days from purchase to withdraw from a distance contract for any reason and get your money back.

Digital content is the exception, and it is the part that catches small sites out. The right is lost if supply begins immediately and you asked for that and you acknowledged that asking for it costs you the right. All three have to happen, and they have to happen before the supply starts.

So, plainly:

At checkout you ask for your licence key to be issued straight away, and you acknowledge that once it has been issued you lose the 14-day right of withdrawal. The key is minted and emailed within seconds of the payment clearing — that is the supply, and it is immediate by design, because a licence key that arrived on day fifteen would be useless.

If you would rather keep the withdrawal right, do not buy: start the 14-day trial instead. It costs nothing, it is the same software with nothing held back, and it lasts as long as the withdrawal period would have.

None of this reduces what you actually get. Our Refund policy gives you 14 days from the charge, no reason required — the same window the withdrawal right would have, offered as a policy rather than a statutory obligation, and honoured whether or not you signed the waiver. The waiver above exists so that the legal position and the commercial position match. It is not there to take something away from you.

If you are buying as a business, the withdrawal right never applied to you in the first place. The refund policy still does.

Business buyers

Same product, same price, same terms. If your procurement process needs a data processing agreement, an invoice rather than a card, or a signature on anything, write to us — see Sub-processors for what a DPA would cover and TODOwhether a DPA is available to sign yet — set docs/compliance-checklist.md in src/lib/site.ts.

Writing to us about billing

TODOthe support address — set LEGAL.contact.support in src/lib/site.ts

Cancelling never requires this. Everything else — a duplicate charge, a receipt with the wrong details on it, a renewal you did not expect — does, and gets answered.