Refund and balance policy.Clear rules for every dollar.

2. Refund eligibility and the review period

Eligibility depends on the type of account you hold — check which one applies to you first.

Individual consumers (7-day review period)

If you purchased balance as a natural person for non-business purposes, Article 19 of Taiwan's Consumer Protection Act entitles you to request a refund of any unused balance in your account within 7 days of completing payment. Balance already applied to patent lookups, OA generation, or monthly-plan deductions is not eligible for refund.

Business accounts

Business accounts that purchase balance for commercial purposes are not covered by the consumer review period under Article 19 of the Consumer Protection Act. Refund requests from business accounts are handled case by case under the exceptions listed in Section 4 below.

Requests made after the review period

We still accept and review refund requests submitted after the 7-day review period on a case-by-case basis, but approval is not guaranteed.

One request per account

Each account may submit one refund request within the review period. A request that has already been processed will not be reopened or duplicated.

3. How refunds are processed

DownloadPatent's payments are handled by third-party payment service providers. We do not support bank transfers or any refund method other than the original payment channel.

1. Submit your refund request through /contact with information that identifies the transaction (payment date, amount, and the payment method used). Do not attach confidential case files.
2. We check your account type and transaction record against the eligibility rules in Section 2 of this page.
3. Once approved, the refund is returned through the original payment method, to the original card or account. We do not send refunds to a different account or by any other method.

How long a refund takes to reach you depends on the payment service provider and your card issuer's own processing times, which are outside our control. This page makes no commitment about refund arrival time.

4. Exceptions

The following situations are not subject to the 7-day review period in Section 2 and may be raised regardless of account type:

• Duplicate charges: the same order was mistakenly charged more than once.
• Confirmed technical errors: a bug on our side caused you to be charged an amount that does not match what you actually owed.
• Unauthorized transactions: a charge resulting from use of your account without your consent.

Please contact us through /contact as soon as you notice the issue and include transaction details to help us verify it; the longer the gap between the transaction and your request, the more supporting evidence we may need.

5. Account deletion and balance

Before deleting your account, please check whether you still have unused balance. Once an account is deleted, remaining balance can no longer be used on the platform and cannot be refunded retroactively. If you submitted an eligible refund request under this policy before deletion and it was accepted, that request is still processed through the normal flow.

6. Balance validity

Balance added by purchase has no expiry date. Sign-up credits are valid for 30 days from the day they are granted; promotional credits are valid until the expiry date we tell you when we give them, which is also shown on your Balance page (see section 8).

Free credits, including sign-up and promotional credits, expire automatically on their expiry date and cannot be refunded. If you have questions about the balance on your account, please contact us through /contact.

7. Service interruptions and billing

If a service interruption or technical issue prevents a lookup or OA request from completing normally, contact us through /contact with the time it happened and any relevant request details, and we will review the charge for that request individually.

DownloadPatent does not currently make any service-level agreement (SLA), uptime, or response-time commitment.

8. Free credits and free downloads

After you verify your email, your account receives US$3 in sign-up credits. We may also give promotional credits, for example to thank you for taking part in an interview; their amount and expiry date are the ones we tell you when we give them, and both are shown on your Balance page. Free credits, including sign-up and promotional credits, are not paid balance: they expire on their expiry date (sign-up credits 30 days after they are granted), cannot be refunded, and cannot be exchanged for cash; this does not limit any right you have under applicable consumer protection law. When a charge is made, the credits that expire first are used first, so free credits are used before balance you bought.

Free download amounts

A signed-in account downloads up to 200 patent PDFs a day for free, or 200 on Monthly. Free downloads are not paid balance, so they are not eligible for refund. These amounts may change.

From 2026-11-18, a free account gets 100 free patent PDFs a month. Monthly includes 3,000 patent PDFs a month, counting other-language versions, and 50 office actions. Past that, each patent is US$0.01. The website and the API share one allowance. Credits you have already bought keep their value.

9. Disputes

If you disagree with how a refund request was handled, you can raise it through /contact with your reasoning. We will arrange a manual review and respond through the same contact channel you used to submit your request.

10. Governing law and jurisdiction

This policy and any dispute relating to refunds are governed by the laws of the Republic of China (Taiwan). The Taiwan Taipei District Court is the court of first-instance jurisdiction agreed by the parties; this does not limit any other jurisdiction a consumer may invoke under the Consumer Protection Act.

11. Subscription fees, cancellation and withdrawal

Monthly renews automatically each month until you cancel. You can cancel at any time on the Balance page; cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid period and you are not charged again. A subscription fee for a period that has already started is not refunded, except for the cases in section 4 (a duplicate charge, a confirmed technical error or an unauthorized transaction) and where the law gives you a right to a refund. Consumers in the European Union or the United Kingdom may have a statutory 14-day right of withdrawal; see the subscription section of the terms, and contact us through the contact page to exercise it. Nothing here limits any right you have under mandatory law.