- We sell React Native templates at $79
- Refund policy: 7 days, no questions asked, processed in 2 business days
- Refund rate over 6 months: 3.8%
- Blended cost of the policy: ~4% of gross revenue
- Would ship it identically on day one again
The policy, verbatim
- 7-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked
- Window starts from the receipt date
- Email support@shaper.studio with your order ID
- Processed within 2 business days
- Excluded: requests after 7 days, third-party API costs
That is the entire policy. There is no "unless you cloned the repo" clause. There is no "unless you used support" clause. There is no cooling-off period, no store-credit-first flow, no retention pitch. If you email us the word "refund" and your order ID within seven days, you get your money back.
Why we chose this
Three arguments won:
1. The buyer cannot inspect the product pre-purchase. With source code, the demo video and screenshots are all you get until the credit card clears. A generous refund policy is the only honest way to say "verify for yourself" in a market where verification requires purchase.
2. If we are right about the product, the policy is cheap. Low refund rate = low policy cost. If we are wrong, the refund rate tells us fast. The only losing scenario is one where our product is bad, and in that scenario we deserve to lose.
3. Refund friction is negative marketing. Every "no refunds" post triggers a Reddit thread. Not being on the wrong side of that conversation is worth something.
Competitor comparison
| Vendor | Window | Conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Applighter | 7 days | None |
| Instamobile | Case-by-case | Bundles non-refundable, lose rights, no refund if support was used |
| Typical CodeCanyon | 14 days | "Not as described" (unfalsifiable in practice) |
| Typical premium boilerplate | 0 days | All sales final |
The refund rate math
At $79 with a 3.8% refund rate:
per-order refund cost = 0.038 * $79 = $3.00
plus Stripe fixed fee retained on refund = $0.30
= ~$3.30 lost per paid order
For context: a Dev.to writeup last year reported ~40% refund rate at $29 vs ~4% at $79 for a similar product. Our number matches that curve. Price is a filter. Cheap templates get impulse buyers who impulse-refund.
What it actually cost us
- Refunded revenue: four-figure number over six months
- Stripe fixed fees: ~30¢ per refund, kept by Stripe
- Support time: ~90 min/month (5 min email + 1 click Stripe)
- Opportunity cost: buyers who would have taken store credit but got cash instead
- Total blended cost: ~4% of gross revenue
What it did not cost us
- Reddit threads: zero
- Public complaints: zero
- Chargebacks: zero (chargebacks are worse than refunds — fees, disputes, reputation)
- Hostile support emails: zero
Counter-intuitive benefits
Refund requests are the highest-signal feedback we get. Happy customers say nothing. Refund requests come with implicit info — which template, whether they opened the docs, whether they cloned the repo. Two refunds in one week from buyers who never opened the setup docs told us the docs were too easy to miss. We fixed the onboarding email.
Generous refunds pre-qualify buyers. "Seven days is plenty" = the buyer we want. "Seven days isn't enough" = the buyer who will not evaluate the code for months, will not ship, and will not be happy regardless.
The support inbox stays calm. "I want a refund" as a two-word conversation instead of a negotiation drops the emotional temperature. Vendors with strict policies deal with disputes, chargebacks, and public complaints. Generous refunds head off most chargebacks before they start.
When not to do this
- Product under $30: impulse buyers push refund rate toward 40%. Fix: raise the price or tighten the policy.
- Real marginal cost per unit: source code is zero marginal cost, so we can absorb 3.8%. Physical goods cannot.
- Value fully consumed in the refund window: video courses need anti-abuse (e.g., >50% watched voids the refund) or refund rate approaches 100%.
- Cannot deliver the turnaround: a 7-day policy that takes 30 days to process is worse than no policy at all.
The part I did not expect
The policy changed how we write marketing. When the buyer can call your bluff with one email and their money, you stop reaching for weasel words. Every landing page, every screenshot, every code excerpt has to hold up under "would this survive the refund window?" It is the closest thing to product-market fit pressure I have felt in a bootstrapped business.
Full breakdown
Full write-up with the internal numbers, the policy design tradeoffs, and the exact refund-request template we use: on the Applighter blog.
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