What a partial refund should look like, and how the figure is worked out

Partial refunds are where the goodwill of a seller meets arithmetic, and where most buyers stop asking questions because they do not know what question to ask.

Someone offers you a number. It is smaller than you expected. You either accept it or feel vaguely cheated, and in neither case do you find out how it was reached. Which is a shame, because there are only three sensible ways to reach it, they are all easy to check, and naming the method you think should apply changes the conversation entirely.

When partial is the right question

First, be clear about which conversation you are in, because the arithmetic below only applies to one of them.

The service was supplied as agreed and you want to stop early. Nothing went wrong; circumstances changed. You are asking for a favour with a reasonable basis. A partial refund is exactly the right shape of request, and the seller is entitled to say no.

The service was faulty or materially not as described. A different conversation with different rules, where a refund is a remedy rather than a courtesy and consumer law may sit behind you. Opening this one as though you were asking a favour weakens you unnecessarily.

You want the whole payment back. Then it is not a partial refund at all, and the distinctions between the available routes are set out in the difference between a refund, a chargeback and a goodwill credit.

Asking for part of your money back is not a weaker version of asking for all of it. It is a different request, with a much higher chance of being granted, because it acknowledges what you actually received.

The day rate, and why it is the baseline

Every calculation starts from the same idea: what one day of the service cost you.

Take what you paid, divide by the days in the term. A twelve-month plan is 365 days. Multiply the day rate by the days you have not used and you have the theoretical maximum any refund could reasonably be.

That is the ceiling, not the answer. But it is the number to work out first, because everything else is a deduction from it — and you cannot judge a deduction without knowing what it is being deducted from.

Seeing it as a day rate has a second effect, which is to put the whole question in proportion. Arguing hard over a fortnight of a one-screen plan is arguing over roughly three dollars. Knowing that before you start is worth something, and it is one of the reasons an annual payment behaves more like a household budget line than a subscription drip.

Three ways the figure gets reached

Almost every partial refund you will ever be offered comes from one of these.

Straight day-rate. Unused days multiplied by the day rate. The most transparent method and the one buyers can check in ten seconds, which is exactly why it is the one to ask for by name.

Whole months. Completed months are charged and part months are rounded, in the seller's favour more often than not. Simpler to administer, slightly worse for you, and entirely reasonable provided the rounding rule is stated rather than discovered.

Consumed period at the undiscounted rate. The seller charges the time you used at what it would have cost without the annual commitment, and refunds the rest. This produces the smallest figure and is nonetheless the most intellectually honest of the three, because an annual price is lower per month in exchange for the commitment. Break the commitment and the discount was never earned.

That final column is the test that matters. The third method is legitimate only where the undiscounted rate was visible before you bought. A rate invented at the moment of the refund request is not a pricing structure; it is a way of arriving at a smaller number.

A worked example on real numbers

Take the two-screen plan at $97 for the year, with a struck-through comparison price of $129. Suppose 100 days have been used and 265 remain.

A spread of roughly $70 down to $59 on identical facts. Every one of those figures is arguable and none is dishonest. If a seller simply says "we can do sixty", they have almost certainly used the bottom method and have not said so — and asking which method produced it is a perfectly polite question that puts the whole exchange on firmer ground.

Note too how narrow the real disagreement is: about eleven dollars between the most generous and the least. Establish that early and the negotiation usually gets shorter and friendlier.

Deductions that are fair, and ones that are not

Four things commonly come off the top. Two are defensible, one depends, and one is not.

Payment processing cost — fair. The seller paid a percentage to accept your money and does not get it back when they refund. On a partial refund that is a genuine loss to them. It should be small, in the low single digits, and it should be named. Where a third-party processor sat in the middle, who bore that cost is worth understanding, and who you are actually paying when a payment link comes from a processor explains why the answer is not always obvious.

Cross-border or conversion cost — fair, if evidenced. If the payment crossed currencies, some value was lost on the way in and will be lost again on the way out. Real, but it should be a stated figure rather than a shrug. The mechanism is in foreign transaction fees on a yearly subscription.

An early-exit or restocking charge — depends. Acceptable only if it was in the terms you agreed before paying. Discovering it at the moment of the refund request is not a term, it is an announcement. This is one of the specific things worth looking for in reading a subscription's terms before the money moves.

An unexplained "administration fee" — not fair. A round number with no stated basis, appearing only when money is going in your direction, is not a cost. Ask what it covers. The answer, or the absence of one, tells you what you need to know.

Why the amount that lands can differ

You agree a figure and something slightly different appears. Usually there is a dull explanation.

Conversion happens twice. A refund crossing currencies is converted at the rate on the day it is processed, not the day you paid. Over several months that can move in either direction, and neither the seller nor your bank is doing anything unusual. The full version is in paying for a subscription in a currency that is not your own.

A refund is not always a refund. Depending on how recent the payment is, the money may come back as a reversal of the original transaction rather than as a fresh credit, and the two behave differently in your statement and on your timeline — the refund that arrives as a reversal instead of a payment covers why the wait differs.

It goes back the way it came. Refunds return to the original method, not to wherever you would prefer. If the card has since been closed or reissued, the money still travels toward that account and takes longer to settle — the practical handling is in keeping a subscription alive when your card is reissued, lost or expires.

Irreversible routes have no partial anything. A payment made in cryptocurrency cannot be partially reversed, so any refund is a new payment the seller chooses to send, on trust, at a rate set at that moment. That is worth knowing before you choose the route, not after — crypto payments: fast, cheap, and completely final.

How to ask so you get a number back

The single most effective move is to do the arithmetic yourself and put it in the message. Not because your figure will be accepted, but because a specific number with visible working gets answered with another specific number, while a vague request gets a vague answer.

Four sentences is plenty. State the payment date and amount. State the date the service stopped being used, and why. State your calculation and the figure it produces. Ask them to confirm or to explain their own method.

Leave the grievance out. The person reading it can either issue a refund or cannot, and the strength of your feelings is not an input to that. The same discipline that makes any payment query effective applies here, and it is set out in what to send support so a payment problem is solved in one message.

Two more things worth doing. Ask whether credit is available as an alternative and at what value, because it is frequently offered at a better rate than cash and is genuinely the better deal if you intend to stay — the refund that is offered as credit instead of money sets out when to take it. And ask for the processing date and reference once it is agreed, so you are counting from a fact rather than from a promise.

How this is handled here

Our position is set out in full on the refund policy page, and the honest summary is that we would rather fix the service than divide up the year. Most requests that arrive as "can I have some money back" turn out to be a device that was never configured properly or a fault nobody reported at the time.

Where a partial refund is the right answer, the method is a straight day-rate on what you paid, less the payment processing cost where one applies, and we will show the working rather than name a figure. You should expect that of any seller and it costs nothing to provide.

Structurally there is less to argue about here than elsewhere. Payment is one annual charge — $69, $97 or $137 for one, two or three simultaneous screens on the pricing page — with no card kept on file and nothing renewing on its own, so the situation where a refund is really a request to undo an unwanted automatic charge simply does not arise. Why that is deliberate is in why we do not keep your card on file.

If you want a figure worked out for your own dates, send the payment date and the date you stopped using it to WhatsApp, Telegram or support@pay-iptv.com. You will get a number and the sum that produced it, which is the part most people never get anywhere.