Refunds and cancellation
What silken never charges you for, how to stop a subscription, and exactly what stopping it does to a job that is already running. Refund requests are made in writing and read by a person.
Where refunds stand today.
Fourteen days, on any payment, and an honest account of how it is carried out.
If silken is not what you expected, tell us within 14 days of a payment and we refund that payment in full. It applies to a monthly metered invoice as much as to a first charge, so a renewal is covered and not only a purchase. Write to us as section 07 describes; we approve it and return the money to the payment method the charge was taken from.
It is handled by a person, and this page will not imply otherwise. The refund is issued by us through the payment provider rather than by a control in the dashboard or an automatic rule. That is a fact about the process rather than a qualification of the promise — the promise stands; it is a person who keeps it.
On AWS Marketplace it works differently, and you still ask us. AWS collected the payment and issued the bill, on a payment method silken never sees, so AWS is the only party that can reverse the charge. What we do is request the refund from AWS on your behalf. Ask us the same way and within the same 14 days.
AWS issues it on its own timetable, and where it lands depends on how your AWS account pays: an invoice you paid by card is refunded to that card, and an account on AWS invoicing terms receives a credit memo against its bill. Either way it is AWS's settlement, not ours.
Your statutory right, which is separate
If you buy as a consumer rather than for a business, the Consumer Rights Act 2022 gives you 14 days from the day the contract is concluded to cancel a distance contract for a digital service. That is a right the law gives you against the seller — section 08 of the terms names who that is — and it exists whether or not this page mentions it.
You can be charged for what you used before cancelling only where you expressly asked for the service to begin during that period and we gave you the cancellation information the Act requires. Where either is missing, no usage charge is due. Be clear about today: silken asks for no such express request and serves no such notice at signup or on submission, so a consumer cancelling within the 14 days should expect the whole payment back rather than a deduction for usage.
And because we do not give that information, the statutory window is longer than 14 days. Section 114 of the Act extends it by twelve months where the required cancellation information was not provided — ending 14 days after we provide it, if we start doing so sooner.
So a consumer who bought within the last year can still cancel under the Act after our 14-day commitment has run out. That is your right, not our goodwill, and nothing below narrows it.
The 14-day commitment above is a separate promise we make in addition to that right. It applies to business and consumer purchases alike, and where the two differ, the one more favourable to you applies. Nothing on this page reduces a right the law gives you and does not permit to be excluded.
That promise survives the liability clause in section 11 of the terms, which excludes silken's liability for damages as widely as the law allows. A refund returns a payment; it is not compensation for loss, and the exclusion does not reach it.
Everything on the other side of the line — the work that is never billed in the first place — is below. It is automatic and needs no request.
A refund outside the 14-day window, goodwill credit, and a refund of anything prepaid or committed are considered individually: write to us with the job id and it is read by a person. Nothing here is a commitment to reverse such a charge, and nothing here is a refusal to consider one. None of this touches the statutory position above.
One clarification, because the paragraphs above invite a wrong inference: silken does have an operator tool that applies a signed correction to reported usage. It is not the refund mechanism. It exists to reconcile our own ledger against the payment provider's when the two disagree, it is used in both directions, and it is not a discretionary credit or anything a customer can ask for.
What is never billed.
No request, no ticket, no goodwill required — the service simply does not record it.
- A failed file-delivery job records no conversion usage, so there is nothing to refund. Progressive jobs can accrue usage for the published portion even if they later fail, and complete-file ladders charge for the successful delivered renditions, including those in a partially completed job. Check the job’s recorded usage.
- A file-delivery job that never completes records no usage. A job that is still waiting, or that never produced a file at your destination, has recorded none.
- A job retried internally is billed once. If the service retries a job on its own you pay for the one output you receive, not for the attempts.
- The one-off sample conversion meters zero, and does not spend any of your free allowance.
- The first 1,000 output minutes of each UTC calendar month are free for standard SDR H.264 outputs at up to 30 fps, and are taken off before those outputs are metered — see the pricing page.
What that leaves is work silken measured, delivered to your storage, and recorded once. A refund question is about that work, which is why the section above is the honest answer rather than this one.
How to cancel.
Self-service on both rails, and neither one goes through us.
You may stop using silken at any time. There is no notice period to serve and no cancellation form to submit; where you do it depends on how you subscribed.
A card subscription
Cancel it in the billing portal, which you open from the Billing screen of the dashboard. The portal is our payment provider's own hosted page — it is where the subscription is cancelled, where a card is changed, and where past invoices are read. silken does not hold your card details and cannot cancel on your behalf from its own side.
The portal opens for any account that has ever reached our payment provider's checkout, including one that started checkout and walked away without subscribing. It does not depend on the subscription being live, so a delinquent or lapsed account still has the one control that puts it right.
An AWS Marketplace subscription
Cancel it in AWS Marketplace. That subscription is issued and billed by AWS, silken operates no billing portal for it, and the dashboard's portal button is not the place to go. Usage already reported to AWS appears on your AWS bill in the ordinary way.
What cancelling does.
Three separate questions, and they have three different answers.
- A job already running is not stopped. Nothing in the conversion path re-checks your subscription after a job has been accepted, so work in flight finishes, is delivered to your storage, and is billed normally. Individual jobs are not cancelled through the API.
- New jobs are refused straight away. Once the payment provider reports the subscription cancelled, admission refuses further jobs with a clear error naming the reason. There is no grace period on cancellation — the seven days you may have read about apply to a failed payment, which is a different state. Do not plan a migration around a week that does not exist.
- Usage already metered stays payable. Cancelling does not void what has been recorded. A final invoice for the usage in the period is issued by the payment provider in the ordinary monthly-in-arrears way; on AWS Marketplace it appears on your AWS bill.
- Nothing is deleted. Cancelling is not a deletion request. Your account, your jobs and your usage history remain as they are; the privacy policy describes how records are kept and how to ask about them. Cancellation does not remove copies in your storage. Hosted outputs and demonstration uploads follow the retention periods in our privacy notice.
How long a cancelled account and its job history are kept, and whether records are deleted on request, are described in the privacy policy's retention section and in section 10 of the terms. To ask about a specific account, contact us as section 07 describes.
A failed payment is not a cancellation.
This is the one that carries a grace period.
If a payment fails, your account enters a seven-day grace period during which jobs continue to run normally. That window exists so a card that expired over a weekend does not stop your pipeline. It is measured from the moment the failure is reported to us, not from the invoice date.
After the seven days, and in any case where the subscription is unpaid, new jobs are refused until the account is back in good standing. A card subscription is put right by you in the billing portal; an AWS Marketplace subscription is managed in AWS. Jobs that were already running are not stopped, and they are billed normally.
Nothing about the grace period is a discount. Usage inside it is measured and billed like any other usage.
Disputes and suspension.
Worth reading before you raise one with your bank.
A payment dispute raised with your card issuer suspends the silken account as soon as the payment provider tells us about it, and new jobs are refused. That suspension is the one state with no self-service route out: it is cleared by us, and neither the billing portal nor a new subscription lifts it.
If something on an invoice looks wrong, write to us first. A dispute costs you the service while it runs, and we would rather answer the question.
Raising it with us.
A job id turns a complaint into an answer.
Anything on this page — a charge you do not recognise, a job that produced a result you cannot use, a subscription you cannot cancel — goes to the address on the contact page, with the job id where there is one. Requests within the 14-day refund window are handled under section 01. Other requests are considered individually; statutory rights remain unaffected.
The rates behind any of it are on the pricing page. The operative statements of fees, suspension and termination are sections 08 and 10 of the terms; where this page and the terms differ in wording, the terms govern.