The short version
- No subscription, no cancellation. Credits are bought once. Nothing renews, so there is no plan to cancel and no recurring charge to stop.
- Completed lookups are final. A result you dislike is still a result, and the credit for it is spent.
- Failed lookups come back automatically. If a check cannot complete, the credit is returned to your balance without you asking.
- Unspent credits are refundable within 14 days of the payment that bought them.
Completed lookups are not refundable
A lookup is complete when it returns a result. A number that comes back "not registered" or "no account found" was checked just as thoroughly as one that comes back positive — the same query hit the same source and consumed the same cost. The credit for it is spent, and it is not refundable.
It is the rule most per-query data services operate under, and it is why the price per check is low enough to run at volume. If you need certainty about accuracy before committing volume, run a small batch first: a few hundred rows will tell you more about fit than any description on this site.
Failed lookups are recredited automatically
Lookups that fail on our side are a different matter. When a check cannot complete — a job stops halfway, an endpoint returns an error, or a number comes back "unknown" because the lookup itself failed rather than because the number is unregistered — the system returns those credits to your balance. You do not need to open a ticket.
If a failed charge ever slips through without its recredit, write to support@zelnum.com with the job ID or request ID within 30 days and we will recredit it.
Unspent credits can be refunded within 14 days
Within 14 days of a payment, you can ask for the unused portion of that purchase back. The refund is calculated on that specific payment — not on the total account balance, and not on credits from an earlier purchase.
Where a top-up carried bonus credit, the calculation is on what you actually paid. A $200 top-up adds $220.00 to your balance; if none of it has been spent, a refund inside the window returns the $200.00 you paid and the $20.00 bonus is removed with it. Spending draws on the whole balance rather than on the purchased part or the bonus part alone, so a partly used top-up is refunded in proportion to what you paid for the credits that remain.
Refunds go back to the original payment method. Once approved they usually appear on your statement within a few business days, though the exact timing depends on your bank or card issuer rather than on us.
One limit worth knowing before you buy: the refund goes to the payer, through the original payment method. We cannot redirect it to a different person or a different card.
How to request a refund
Write from the email address registered on the account, to support@zelnum.com, and include the order reference printed on your receipt. If you no longer have the receipt, the approximate date and amount of the payment is enough for us to locate it.
We answer on business days, usually within one business day. Requests that arrive inside the 14-day window are honoured even if the reply lands after it, so the timestamp that matters is the one on your email.
EU and UK statutory withdrawal right
If you live in the EU or the UK, consumer law gives you 14 days to withdraw from a distance purchase. For digital content delivered immediately, that right can end once delivery has begun, provided you gave express consent to it starting and acknowledged that you would lose the right.
Because a credit purchase can be spent within seconds of clearing, delivery begins as soon as the credits are added to the account. A completed credit purchase is therefore normally outside the 14-day withdrawal window, and any refund after that point is made under the refund rules above rather than under the statutory right. If you are unsure whether the withdrawal right still applies to your purchase, write to us before you buy and we will tell you where you stand.
Nothing on this page removes a right you have under mandatory consumer law in your own jurisdiction. Where this policy and that law disagree, the law wins.
Credits are not cash
Prepaid credits are a usage balance for this service. They are not a deposit, a wallet, an e-money balance, or a financial instrument, and they are not a claim on any funds held for you.
- Credits cannot be transferred to another account, sold, gifted, or pooled between customers.
- Credits carry no cash value and cannot be withdrawn, cashed out, or exchanged for currency.
- Bonus credit added with a top-up follows the same rules as purchased credit: it is not a separate balance, and it cannot be withdrawn, transferred, or cashed out on its own.
- Credits do not expire while the account is open, and there is no inactivity fee.
- Credits are consumed only by lookups that complete, at the rates published on the pricing page.
If we close an account for a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy, credits already spent on completed lookups stay spent, and unspent credits on that account are not refundable either — except where the consumer law of your jurisdiction requires us to return them.
Before you file a chargeback
One request before you escalate: contact us first. Nearly every billing dispute is faster to resolve by email than through a card dispute, which typically takes weeks, freezes the account in the meantime, and costs both sides a fee.
If a chargeback is filed, the account and its balance are paused while the dispute is open. We respond to disputes with the order record, the delivery log, and the usage history, which is usually enough to resolve it — but the straightforward path is the email.
Contact
Refund requests, billing questions, or anything on this page you want clarified before you buy: support@zelnum.com, or through the contact page. The rules these refunds sit inside are in the Terms of Service.