Refund Policy
The first week is free, so nobody has to pay to find out whether this works. This page says what can be given back, when, and what giving it back does to your account.
Last updated 12 August 2026
The first week is free
A netid gets one week the first time it signs in, provisioned automatically. No card is asked for and nothing is charged.
That free week does the work a refund usually has to do. The question — does this actually work, on my phone, in my dorm, on the campus network — you can settle for yourself, for nothing, before any money moves. By the time you pay, you are not paying blind.
Every purchase is one-off
There is no subscription to cancel, because there is no subscription. Each purchase buys a fixed number of days, once — 30, 60, 120 or 365 of them. The prices and the lengths are set out under paying for time in the Terms, and this page does not keep a second copy of them to drift out of step.
All prices are in US dollars. Nothing renews itself, no card is stored anywhere in this service, and nothing here can charge you a second time. Checkout happens on Gumroad in a new tab, so this site never sees your card details.
So stopping is simply not buying again. Your remaining days run down, the account stops connecting, and nothing is taken. Letting time lapse is not a refund and does not need one.
Who holds the money
Gumroad is the merchant of record. It took the payment, it holds the money, and it is the only party that can send the money back. We never held it and cannot move it.
Ask us anyway, not Gumroad. Write to support@dkuvpn.com; a person checks the sale against our own record of what it granted and decides, and where the answer is yes we issue the refund through Gumroad by hand. Gumroad returns it to whatever was charged.
When you can ask
There is no deadline and no formula. Every request is looked at on its own, by a person, who weighs what you say happened against what the server actually recorded.
It has to work that way, because of how little the server holds. It keeps one running total of bytes for the whole account — never a figure per purchase, and never a list of what was reached. So there is no way to work out how much of one plan you used, and a rule written as a fraction would be a rule nobody here could apply. What is left is judgement, and saying so is more honest than a number.
The clear cases are the ones where a payment bought nothing it should have: a failure at our end we could not fix, the same plan bought twice by accident, or a payment that added nothing because the account it landed on has no expiry date to extend. Those are refunded. Everything else is a conversation — write, say what happened, and we will tell you either way.
The free first week is why no deadline is needed. What a deadline guards against is paying blind, and that is settled before any money moves.
What is not refunded
- Time you have already used. A refund is for time you did not get, not for time you had.
- An account an administrator disabled for breach of the Terms. Paying does not lift that — granting time deliberately never touches an account's status, so a disabled account stays disabled even when a payment lands on it.
- A subscription link you passed on. It works like a password: anyone holding it can use the account, and your dashboard says exactly that next to the link. Days and traffic spent by whoever you gave it to were still spent.
- A site that refuses you once the connection itself is working. Traffic leaves through one of the exits this service offers — Durham, Iowa, Seoul, Tokyo, Bangkok or Singapore — and whether a particular site accepts traffic from that address is that site's decision. We cannot change its mind and cannot refund for it.
- Ordinary interruption. The connection can be broken by network conditions at either end, and a bad afternoon is not a refundable failure. A long outage is a different conversation — write to us rather than assume.
What a refund does to your account
This is the part worth knowing before you ask for one. When Gumroad tells us a sale was refunded, we read our own record of that sale — who received it, how many days it granted — and subtract exactly those days from that account's expiry date. Nobody has to act on it: the days come off when Gumroad's notice reaches us, normally within a minute of the refund being issued. If our end is unreachable, Gumroad tries four times over roughly seventy minutes and then stops, and past that the reversal is applied by hand.
The days come off your expiry date, not off a balance. If the days that purchase bought are the days you are living on, the refund ends your access when it lands — not at the end of the month you thought you had.
They come off the account the sale was applied to: the netid carried on the checkout link, or failing that the account matching the Duke address on the receipt. If you paid for somebody else's account, refunding that payment takes the time back from them, not from you.
One account is untouched in both directions — one with no expiry date at all. Buying time adds nothing to it, and reversing that purchase takes nothing off it. If that is what happened to a payment, say so: the money can come back and the account loses nothing.
Our record of the sale is kept afterwards with its day count set to zero, rather than deleted. That is what stops a late redelivery of the original payment notice granting the same days a second time. The Privacy Policy says what that record holds.
Partial refunds
Gumroad can return part of a payment. Its notice does not say how much came back, and our record of a sale holds a number of days and nothing else, so there is no honest fraction to work out from it.
A partial refund removes the whole period that sale granted. Half of a year plan refunded takes back all 365 days, not 182. The alternative would be leaving paid time on an account for money that has been returned. If you are thinking of asking for part of a payment back, say so in the email first, and we will tell you what it costs you in days before anything moves.
Chargebacks and disputes
A dispute raised with your bank reaches us as the same kind of notice a refund does, and it does the same thing: the days that sale granted come off the account. The one case it cannot reach on its own is a payment we applied by hand, because there is no record saying what it was worth — those we reverse by hand too.
And a dispute you lose does not undo itself. The days came off when the dispute was opened; nothing puts them back when it is decided in our favour, so write to us and we will restore them by hand.
It is also the slow way round. A dispute takes weeks, its fees fall on a service that charges $4.95 for a month, and it explains nothing to the people who could have fixed the problem. Email us first. If a refund is the right answer we will say so, and it will take days rather than weeks.
One consequence worth knowing: a sale that Gumroad already reports as refunded, partially refunded, disputed or charged back grants nothing at all. If a payment never showed up on your account, check whether it was reversed before asking us to look for it.
Refunds and stacked time
Time stacks: a purchase counts from whatever is left on the account rather than from the day you buy, so buying early never burns days you already paid for. Reversals follow the same ledger one sale at a time — refunding one purchase removes that purchase's days and leaves every other purchase alone.
What a refund cannot do is put the calendar back where it stood. Buy a month in September and a year in October, then refund the September month, and 30 days come off the expiry the two purchases built between them. The account keeps the year and loses the month.
How to ask
One email to support@dkuvpn.com. There is no button for this and no form: a person reads what went wrong and decides. Include:
- Your netid — the name your dashboard shows you signed in as. On a duke.edu address that is the part before the @.
- The Gumroad receipt. Forwarding that email is the simplest way to hand us the sale id, which is what our record of the payment is filed under.
- The date you paid, and which plan you bought.
- What went wrong, in a sentence or two. If it is a connection problem, name the app, the device and the exit you were on — that is often something we can fix instead.
We answer within one business day. Nothing in this app issues a refund: a person reads the request, decides, and if the answer is yes issues it through Gumroad by hand — normally in that same reply, and you need do nothing on Gumroad's side. If the answer is no, we say why. The only automatic part comes afterwards, when the days come off the account, as what a refund does sets out.
Two things that are not refunds and are usually faster: time granted to the wrong netid can be moved to the right one, and a payment that never reached us can be applied by hand. Nothing here goes looking for payments that went astray, so one stays lost until somebody tells us. If that is your problem, say so and we will do that instead.
When the money arrives
Gumroad returns a refund to the method it was taken from. From there it is your bank's timetable and not ours — usually a few working days, sometimes ten. Neither we nor Gumroad can make an issuer post it sooner, and we cannot watch it arrive, so Gumroad's own refund receipt is the confirmation that it was sent.
Everything is charged in US dollars. If your card settled in another currency your bank converts twice, once out and once back, at whatever rate applied on each of those two days — so the amount that returns can be a little more or a little less than the amount that left. That difference belongs to the exchange rate, and nobody here can adjust it.
Contact and changes
Refund requests, and anything else about a payment, go to support@dkuvpn.com. It is the same mailbox as everything else here, read by the students who run dkuvpn alongside their own coursework.
The date at the top of this page changes when this document changes, and this page is the only announcement: there is no mailing list, because the only mail this service sends anyone is a sign-in code. A change is not applied backwards — the version published on the day you paid governs that purchase.
dkuvpn is run by students and is not a Duke Kunshan University service. The Terms set out what that means for what can be promised about the connection you are buying.