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Refund Policy

Last updated:

The short version

We'll fully refund a rental that fails on our side. We'll usually refund a barely-used rental within 24 hours of purchase. Beyond that we don't refund — game-server rentals are short by design and almost every bundle is consumed before the request would be reasonable. Specific exclusions, abuse protections, and the EU cooling-off interaction are all spelled out below.

Full refund — service failure on our side

We refund the full purchase amount when:

  • Provisioning fails and the server never reaches a playable state.
  • The server is unreachable for more than 2 consecutive hours due to an issue under our direct control (our infrastructure, our control plane, our orchestrator).
  • A bug on our side caused the bundle hours to drain while no one was actually playing — and our internal logs confirm it.

These refunds bypass the goodwill window: time of purchase is irrelevant when the service materially failed.

Goodwill refund — within 24 hours

Within 24 hours of purchase (UTC, computed from the paidAttimestamp on your order), and provided you've barely used the rental, you can self-serve a refund directly from the dashboard. “Barely used” means:

  • Group Mode bundles: under 30 minutes of in-game play time consumed.
  • Always-on day-based rentals: within the first 24 hours since purchase, regardless of server uptime.

This is a goodwill gesture for accidental purchases, wrong-game clicks, or squad-coordination changes; it's not a contractual right. Outside these self-serve thresholds you can still email support and we'll review case by case, but the threshold above is what the dashboard's “Cancel + refund” button auto-approves.

After 24 hours, or after meaningful play, we don't offer refunds. The product is consumable — once a squad has used the server, the rental has done its job.

What is not refundable

Even within the 24-hour window, we do not refund for:

  • Issues outside our control:your network or ISP, your game client crashing, your computer's ability to run the game, third-party VPNs, or game-publisher anti-cheat bans.
  • Game-publisher problems:a Steam or Mojang outage that blocks your friends from connecting is a real frustration but isn't something we can compensate for — your bundle pauses on its own when nobody connects.
  • Mods or server-side configuration you introduced:if you ran an unstable mod, set memory-busting world settings, or pointed a custom client at the server in a way that broke things, the rental still met its contract.
  • Wake-time within the published range:our wake times are stated up-front per game (Rust ~3 min cold-start, smaller games <2 min). A wake within that range isn't a service failure.
  • Already-restored snapshots:if you used the recovery restore on an expired bundle, the new bundle is its own paid rental and the original isn't reversible.
  • Bundles already exhausted: a bundle whose playtime hours have run to zero, or whose calendar window has ended, is consumed and not refundable.
  • Account-deletion-driven cancellations:if you request account deletion mid-rental we'll process the deletion but the rental is forfeit — we can't refund a rental we no longer have your contact details to refund.

SLA credits are not refunds

When we miss our published service-level targets — wake takes longer than the stated cold-start window, or the server is down while it should be up — we automatically credit the lost time back to your bundle. See the Service Level policy. Those credits are not cash refunds; they extend your existing rental. Most downtime situations resolve through SLA credits without ever needing a refund conversation.

Anti-abuse limits

Refunds (full or goodwill) are limited to one per customer per 90-day rolling window. Repeated requests beyond that, or a pattern of buy-play-refund across multiple rentals, will be reviewed case-by-case and may be declined or result in account suspension. We will always honor a clear service failure regardless of history, but recreational refund-cycling isn't something we can sustainably absorb.

Chargebacks

If you have a billing concern, please contact us before disputing the charge with your bank or card issuer. We respond to refund requests within one business day and the same outcome takes minutes through us versus weeks through a chargeback.

Chargebacks initiated without first contacting us will be disputed with the supporting evidence we keep for every order (provisioning logs, connection logs, your dashboard activity). An account that has filed a chargeback may be suspended pending resolution and is ineligible for future Ember rentals while the dispute is open. After-the-fact chargeback for a service we actually delivered is grounds for permanent account closure.

Acceptable-use violations

Servers terminated for violating the Acceptable Use Policy — stress-testing, attempting to use the VM as a forwarding proxy, hosting unauthorized content, or other abuse — are not eligible for refund. Termination decisions are at our discretion and the evidence we keep for those decisions is enough to support a chargeback dispute if one follows.

EU / UK consumer rights

Under EU Directive 2011/83/EU and equivalent UK law, customers purchasing digital services remotely have a 14-day right to cancel. That right is waived as soon as the service has begun being delivered with the customer's explicit consent. By clicking Start a server at checkout you provide that consent — your VM is provisioned within minutes and the service is treated as consumed from that point.

If you are an EU/UK consumer and want to exercise the 14-day right before any service has been consumed (i.e., you paid but never clicked through to provision), email [email protected] within 14 days of purchase and we'll refund in full.

Processing

  • Refunds are issued to the original payment method only. We can't redirect a refund to a different card, account, or person.
  • Stripe typically posts refunds within 5–10 business days. The window is your bank's, not ours — we trigger immediately on approval.
  • Currency conversion (if your card was billed in a non-USD currency) follows Stripe's rates at refund time, which may differ from the original purchase rate by a small amount. That spread is your card issuer's, not a fee from us.
  • Transactions under $1.00 (e.g. the $0.99 entry bundle) are credited as future-rental balance rather than cash-refunded by default — Stripe's minimum-fee structure makes a cash refund net-negative for both sides. Cash refund still available on request.

Non-transferable

Rentals and any related refunds belong to the original purchaser. We can't transfer a rental, a credit, or a refund to a different account or person, even with both sides' consent — the financial and ownership trail has to stay clean for chargeback and tax purposes.

Force majeure

Service failures caused by events outside our reasonable control — internet backbone outages, our upstream cloud provider's regional incidents lasting beyond their published RTO, denial-of- service attacks targeting our infrastructure, government actions, or natural disasters — are handled under the Service Level policy via auto-credit, not through cash refund.

How to request

Use the contact form with your order ID (visible on the dashboard) and a short note on what happened — every ticket goes into the same queue and we reply within one business day. Email [email protected] works as a fallback for the contractual record.

Changes to this policy

We update this page in place; the Last updated date at the top reflects the most recent revision. Changes apply to new orders placed after the revision date — orders already in flight at the time of a change continue under the policy that was in effect when the order was placed.