Refund Policy

This Refund Policy forms an integral part of the PulaIndex Terms of Service and governs the limited circumstances in which PulaIndex (operated by HOPEKESEGOTRUSTFIRM (PTY) LTD) will refund funds. By using the platform you acknowledge that PulaIndex's service is a digital marketplace consumed immediately on use and that, as a general rule, all platform fees and participant rewards are final and non-refundable once a submission has been approved (whether manually or automatically) or once funds have left the researcher's wallet by way of reservation, transfer or payout.

PulaIndex (HOPEKESEGOTRUSTFIRM (PTY) LTD) is the seller and merchant of record for all researcher charges. Funding a wallet is a purchase of prepaid PulaIndex platform-service credits — a completed sale of a digital service — and is not a cash deposit, stored value, money transmission or escrow. Participant rewards are incentive disbursements PulaIndex pays as principal from its own funds on separate payout rails; a researcher's card payment is never routed onward to a participant. Because each charge is a completed purchase governed by this policy, you agree to use the refund process in Section 4 below rather than initiating a card chargeback or payment reversal.

1. No general right of refund

• Wallet deposits are credited as platform balance for the purpose of paying participants and platform fees. They are not held as a cash deposit on your behalf and are not refundable on demand.
• The 40% platform fee is the consideration for PulaIndex's sourcing, matching, anti-fraud, payment, hosting, support and dispute-handling services, all of which are rendered the moment a study runs, regardless of the researcher's downstream use of the resulting data. The platform fee on any approved submission is strictly non-refundable.
• Participant rewards on approved or auto-approved submissions are strictly non-refundable. You waive any right to claw back rewards from participants on grounds of changed business needs, dissatisfaction with the qualitative content of a response that nonetheless meets the study brief, or post-hoc revisions to your screener.
• To the maximum extent permitted by law, you waive any statutory right of withdrawal, cooling-off, cancellation or distance-selling refund in respect of wallet deposits, platform fees and approved rewards, on the basis that the service is a digital service supplied with your express consent and acknowledgement that you lose any such right once the service starts.

2. Limited circumstances in which PulaIndex may issue a refund

PulaIndex will, in its sole and absolute discretion, consider a refund only in the following narrowly defined cases:

• Rejected submissions within the review window. Where a researcher rejects a submission in good faith within the thirty (30) day review window, both the reserved reward and the corresponding 40% platform fee on that specific submission are released back to the researcher's wallet as platform credit (not as a cash refund).
• Unfilled study slots. Where a study is closed (by the researcher or by PulaIndex) with unfilled participant slots, the reserved reward and platform fee for those unfilled slots are released back to the researcher's wallet as platform credit.
• Verified duplicate charge. Where PulaIndex's billing system has demonstrably charged the same wallet for the same deposit twice as a result of a PulaIndex platform error, the duplicate amount will be refunded to the original payment method within thirty (30) business days of verification.
• Confirmed platform-side fraud. Where PulaIndex confirms that a study's reward pool was paid out as a direct result of a verified platform-side security breach (and not a researcher-side leak of completion codes, study URLs, credentials or screener criteria), PulaIndex may, at its discretion, restore the affected balance as platform credit.
• Closure of unused wallet balance. Where a researcher requests permanent account closure and has an unused wallet balance that was deposited within the preceding ninety (90) days, has never been reserved against a study, and is not subject to any open dispute, investigation, chargeback, sanctions hold or legal process, PulaIndex may, at its discretion and subject to KYC re-verification, return the remaining principal to the original payment method less (i) any third-party processor refund fees, (ii) any FX losses, and (iii) a USD 25.00 administrative-handling charge per refund request. Balances older than ninety (90) days, or balances that have been used to reserve funds against any study (even partially), are not eligible for cash refund and remain available only as platform credit.

3. Circumstances in which PulaIndex will not refund

For the avoidance of doubt, PulaIndex will not issue a refund, credit, or compensation of any kind in any of the following situations, and you waive any claim to one:

• You changed your mind, your research direction, your client's brief, your funding situation, or your internal approvals after publishing a study.
• You are dissatisfied with the qualitative depth, insightfulness, articulation, accent, demographic mix or any other subjective property of responses that nonetheless meet the screener and brief you submitted.
• You failed to review submissions within the thirty (30) day window and they were auto-approved under the Terms.
• Your completion codes, study URLs, screener criteria, or external survey-tool credentials were leaked, guessed, brute-forced or otherwise compromised on your side, or your external survey tool failed to enforce your fraud controls.
• You experienced lower-than-expected fill rates, slower-than-expected recruitment, or any other commercial outcome of running a study.
• The platform, or any third-party service the platform depends on (including Clerk, Supabase, Stripe, Paystack, PayPal, mobile-money operators or banking partners) experienced downtime, latency, degraded performance or temporary unavailability, except to the extent expressly required by mandatory consumer-protection law.
• You initiated, or your bank/card-issuer initiated, a chargeback, payment reversal or pre-arbitration claim. PulaIndex will defend such claims, and any disputed amount remains a debt owed by you to PulaIndex along with associated processor fees and our reasonable cost of defence.
• Your account, balance or transaction has been frozen, withheld or reversed under the Terms (suspension, AML/sanctions), or any applicable law, court order or regulatory instruction.
• You have breached any material provision of the Terms, in which case PulaIndex may, in addition to other remedies, set off pending refunds against losses caused by the breach.
• The refund request relates to taxes, FX margins, intermediary bank fees, processor fees, or any other charge imposed by a third party, even where those charges are passed through on a PulaIndex statement.
• The refund request is submitted more than sixty (60) days after the original transaction (this is a strict limitation period; later requests are time-barred and will be rejected on that ground alone).

4. How to request a refund

• Submit refund requests in writing to support@pulaindex.com from the email address registered on the account, including: account ID, transaction ID(s), date(s) of the charge, the exact amount in USD, the section of this Refund Policy you are relying on, and any supporting evidence.
• PulaIndex will acknowledge the request within five (5) business days and aim to make a final determination within thirty (30) business days. Complex or disputed cases may take longer.
• All refund decisions are made by PulaIndex in its sole discretion, except where mandatory consumer-protection law in the participant's or researcher's jurisdiction provides otherwise. Where such law applies, this Refund Policy is read down only to the minimum extent strictly necessary to comply.
• Approved refunds are paid to the original payment instrument used for the original transaction. Cash refunds to third-party accounts, alternative cards, alternative bank accounts or third-party wallets are not supported.
• Refunds are paid net of (i) any third-party processor refund fees, (ii) FX losses on the conversion back to your original settlement currency, (iii) any platform credit that has already been consumed or reserved, and (iv) the USD 25.00 administrative-handling charge where section 2 applies.

5. No-liability acknowledgement

This Refund Policy is the sole and exclusive remedy available to you in respect of any monetary claim against PulaIndex relating to wallet balances, platform fees, study reservations, participant rewards or payouts. Under no circumstances will PulaIndex be liable for lost profits, lost research opportunity, lost client revenue, reputational harm, internal investigation cost, or any other indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damage arising out of any refund refusal, partial refund, or delay in processing a refund. PulaIndex's total aggregate liability for all refund-related claims in any twelve (12) month period is capped at the lesser of (a) the platform fees actually paid by you in that period, or (b) USD 1,000.

6. Contact

Refund and billing queries: support@pulaindex.com