1. What this policy covers
This policy covers subscription payments made to Digilight India for Digilight PMS — the software your hotel pays for.
It does not cover money your hotel takes from its own guests. Digilight PMS records those payments, but Digilight India never holds that money and cannot refund it. If you are a hotel guest looking for a refund of your room bill, you must contact the hotel you stayed at. We are the hotel's software supplier; we are not the hotel, and we have no access to its bank account.
That is the single most likely misunderstanding anyone reading this page will arrive with, which is why it is the first thing on it.
2. Nobody is being charged yet
As at the date of this draft, no customer can pay for Digilight PMS through the product. Payments are not switched on. Every account today is a free 14-day trial, and no card is collected to start one.
This section will be removed when payments go live. Until then, there is nothing to refund, and this page exists so that the rules are settled before the first rupee changes hands, not after.
3. The trial comes first
Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, and no card is collected. Nobody pays for Digilight PMS before they have used it.
BUSINESS DECISION REQUIRED — is the trial the remedy, or is there one on top of it?
Reason: This is the argument that decides the shape of the whole policy. Because the customer has already had 14 free days with the full product and never handed over a card, there is a strong case that a money-back window is unnecessary. There is an equally strong case that a short one removes the last hesitation before a first payment and costs almost nothing.
Suggested options:
- No cooling-off period. The trial is the trial. Simplest, and defensible.
- 7-day money-back on the first payment only (not on renewals). Cheap insurance, easy to say on a pricing page, and a rare claim in practice given the trial.
- A cooling-off period on every payment, including renewals. Most generous, hardest to control.
Whichever is chosen must be stated here in numbers, not adjectives.
4. Cancelling your subscription
You can cancel your subscription at any time.
If you are on a monthly plan, your subscription remains active until the end of the month you have paid for.
If you are on an annual plan, your subscription remains active until the end of the paid billing period.
Your subscription does not renew automatically. We do not store your card and we hold no payment mandate — so cancelling is not a race against a charge. Nothing will be taken from you unless you deliberately pay again.
To cancel, write to support@digilightpms.com.
ENGINEERING CONSTRAINT — read this before building a cancel button.
This is not a drafting note. It is a warning to whoever implements self-service cancellation later.
The promise above — "remains active until the end of the paid billing period" — is honoured today because cancellation is manual: we simply do not invoice again, and the subscription runs out its paid period as normal.
But the product has a
canceledstatus, and it is not in the list of statuses that grant access. If an engineer wires a cancel button that sets it, the customer's access is revoked immediately — including access for an annual subscriber who has paid for nine more months. The code comment beside it says access "runs to period end". It does not. Only the status flip waits for period end; entitlement stops at once.Whoever builds that button must make
canceledan entitling status untilcurrentPeriodEnd, or this published policy is breached the day the button ships.
BUSINESS DECISION REQUIRED — self-service cancellation is out of scope for v1.0
Reason: There is no cancel button in the product — not for customers, and not for Digilight India's own admin staff. Manual cancellation by email has been accepted as sufficient for v1.0.
That is a defensible choice at this size, but it has a consequence this policy must not hide: a customer's ability to cancel depends on us reading our email.
Suggested options:
- Keep manual cancellation for v1.0, and commit here to acknowledging a cancellation request within a stated number of working days. State the number.
- Build self-service cancellation before taking payments (see the engineering constraint above).
5. When we refund
5.1 Duplicate or erroneous charges
Refunded in full. If we charge you twice, or charge you for something you did not buy, you get the money back. This is not a judgement call.
5.2 Annual subscriptions cancelled part-way through
BUSINESS DECISION REQUIRED — this is the one that will be argued about
Reason: An annual subscriber pays for twelve months up front. Someone who cancels in month three has paid ₹49,990 for Pro and used a quarter of it. There is no default answer, and the answer must be a number.
Suggested options:
- No refund. The discount was granted in exchange for the commitment. Clean, and common. Hardest to sell.
- Pro-rata refund of the unused months, at the annual rate they actually paid. Most generous, and it means the customer effectively got the annual discount for a period they did not commit to.
- Pro-rata refund of the unused months, recalculated at the monthly list price. This claws back the two free months that were given on the assumption they would stay a year. Fair, defensible, and the one most SaaS companies land on — but it must be explained clearly here, because a customer who expects option 2 and receives option 3 will feel cheated by arithmetic.
The billing engine can compute the unused-period credit to the paise for any of these. It is not currently wired into any customer-facing flow, so whichever rule is chosen becomes a small piece of work as well as a sentence.
5.3 Monthly subscriptions
BUSINESS DECISION REQUIRED
Reason: The expected rule is that cancellation takes effect at the end of the month already paid for, with no refund of that month. Confirm it — and note it is the natural consequence of §4, which is why it is likely right.
5.4 Extended service failure
BUSINESS DECISION REQUIRED — and it is constrained by the Terms
Reason: If the service is unavailable for a prolonged period, is a refund or a service credit due, and on what trigger?
This section cannot promise a remedy for missing an uptime commitment that the Terms of Service does not make. The two documents must agree. If the Terms commit to no uptime figure — which is the current recommendation — then this section has no trigger to hang a refund on, and should say so honestly rather than gesture at "significant outages".
6. When we do not refund
BUSINESS DECISION REQUIRED. The exclusions, stated plainly and without weasel wording. A refund policy that reads as though it has exceptions it is not admitting to damages trust more than a strict policy that is honest about being strict.
Draft this only after §5 is settled — the exclusions are the shadow of the inclusions.
7. How to request a refund
Write to support@digilightpms.com with your hotel name, the invoice number, and what happened.
BUSINESS DECISION REQUIRED. Confirm this is the only route, or add an in-product one. Note that refunds are processed by Digilight India's finance staff — there is no self-service refund, and none is planned for v1.0.
8. How long it takes
There are two clocks here, and this policy must separate them or it will be accused of stalling:
- How long we take to decide on a refund and instruct it.
- How long the payment gateway and your bank then take to return the money to your original payment method — which is out of our hands entirely.
LAWYER REVIEW REQUIRED — state both numbers, and get the second one right
Reason: Both figures are unset. The second must be taken from the payment gateway's published settlement timelines, not estimated — it is the number a customer will hold us to, and it is the one we do not control.
Suggested options: state our decision window in working days, and quote the gateway's own stated window for the money to land, attributed to the gateway.
A related fact counsel should know: the application does not currently call the gateway's refund API. A refund is issued by hand in the gateway's dashboard by a member of our finance staff, and then recorded in the product. This works, and it is auditable — a refund cannot exist without a credit note, and the total refunded can never exceed the credit note. But it is a manual step, and the timeline we publish must be one a human being can actually meet.
9. GST on a refunded payment
Subscription prices exclude GST, which is charged on top. Where a payment is refunded, the tax is dealt with by issuing a credit note.
LAWYER REVIEW REQUIRED
Reason: State how GST is treated on a refund — whether the tax component is returned, and what credit note is issued. This must satisfy the GST rules on credit notes and match what the invoicing engine actually issues.
Note the dependency: GST is not currently switched on (see Terms §4.4), so invoices today carry zero tax. This section cannot be finalised until that is resolved.
10. Chargebacks
If you dispute a charge with your bank without contacting us first, we will be asked to respond to it by the gateway and the money will be held while that happens.
Please write to us first. It is faster for you, and it is almost always a misunderstanding we can fix in a day.
11. Changes to this policy
A change to this policy applies to payments made after the change. It does not apply retrospectively to money you have already paid.
12. How to contact us
Note on why this page exists at all. A published, reachable refund and cancellation policy is a standard condition of payment-gateway merchant onboarding in India. This page is therefore a prerequisite for taking payment, not an optional courtesy — which is precisely why it must say something true rather than something convenient.