The short version

We captured the live Carrd terms document (carrd.com/docs/general/terms, 52,871 characters of visible text) on 2026-09-25 and read every refund-, renewal- and balance-related clause. The finding is not that Carrd’s refund policy is strict. It is that there is no refund policy — no 14-day window, no 30-day window, no conditions you can plan around. What the terms actually say:

  1. Money you pay becomes the company’s property and an “account balance.” Verbatim: “All amounts you pay to purchase virtual cash or credits will become the exclusive property of Carrd” (Section 2, account-balance clause). Balances “cannot be withdrawn; once funds have been deposited in your account, they can only be used to purchase Products.”
  2. Refunds exist only as a discretionary favor. Section 2(J): “We do not generally offer return of funds or credits on purchases unless required by law, but we reserve the right to do so in our sole and absolute discretion.”
  3. Downgrading converts your remaining time into credit, not cash. Section 2(H): a downgrade adds “a prorated credit for the time remaining” to your balance; only then, “upon request, we may, in our sole discretion, grant a full or partial refund of this credit to the original funding payment.” So the only documented path back to your card runs through credit you already surrendered, plus a request they may decline.
  4. Renewal is yearly until you cancel. “The Pro plan may also be automatically renewed on an annual basis and remain in effect until cancelled by you.” There is no monthly cycle to fall back to — cancellation before the renewal date is, in practice, the entire refund strategy.

Where Carrd sits against the two refund pages we’ve already verified

This site has clause-level refund pages for two other tools, which makes the posture comparison concrete (each quote is from that product’s own terms, on its own stated check date):

Cal.com (checked 2026-09-11) Tally Pro (checked 2026-09-11) Carrd (checked 2026-09-25)
Stated refund window None — “paid Subscription fees are non-refundable” None — yearly plan; EU consumer withdrawal “not applicable” once you subscribe None stated, none needed: everything is discretionary
Escape hatch “Except when required by law” Mandatory-law carve-outs outside the contract “Unless required by law” + sole-discretion grants
What a downgrade gives you n/a (no ladder) n/a Prorated credit, refundable only “in our sole discretion”
Money model Card billed per cycle Card billed per cycle Prepaid balance; funds “exclusive property of Carrd”

Carrd is the only one of the three that runs your money through a stored-value balance first — a mechanic with almost no refund precedent — while being the cheapest, and one of the few products here you can try for 7 days with no card at all (see the Carrd terms check for that capture).

The one balance exception, and who it’s for

The “cannot be withdrawn” rule has a documented carve-out: earnings from Carrd’s own referral and maker programs are marked “available to payout,” payable via PayPal within ~5 business days once the balance reaches $25 (Section on Partner Program Earnings). That distinction matters for reading the refund posture: Carrd keeps user deposits locked as store credit while paying out partner earnings — the balance model is designed to retain customer money, not to hold it neutrally.

What we did not verify

  • No account was created and no payment made — every statement here is clause text from the terms document captured 2026-09-25, not a transaction we exercised.
  • The help center’s article-level refund Q&A could not be reached from our network location in this session (one article URL variant returned 404); the terms document is the authoritative contract and is what we quote.
  • We did not verify whether “required by law” would practically cover your jurisdiction (e.g. EU 14-day withdrawal vs. US state rules) — the terms print no jurisdiction clause anchor for consumers in the sections we captured.
  • Prices cited in the frontmatter are the plan ladder re-captured zero-drift on 2026-09-25 (15/15 SKU tokens matched the 2026-09-21 dump); the ladder itself is documented in the Carrd review.

Verdict (terms-level, no score)

No star rating — we made no purchase. What the clauses support: Carrd’s refund surface is entirely discretionary, its balance model is the least refund-like we’ve indexed (prepaid, non-withdrawable, company property), and the practical protection for a buyer is the yearly auto-renew cycle plus the no-card 7-day trial — cancel before renewal, and try before buying. That is a defensible posture at $9–19/year; it would be a much harder sell at enterprise prices.

Methodology & sources

  • Terms document: carrd.com/docs/general/terms captured 2026-09-25 via proxied headless Chromium; full visible text (52,871 chars) archived at eval-ops/runs/2026-09-25-calpricing-carrdterms/terms-fulltext.txt. Six clause anchors asserted against the rendered text layer before screenshots (all HIT): “grant a full or partial refund of this credit”, “refunds which shall be granted in our sole discretion”, “automatically renewed on an annual basis and remain in effect until cancelled”, “prorated credit for the time remaining”, “exclusive property of Carrd”, “cannot be withdrawn”.
  • Pricing zero-drift re-capture: carrd.co + carrd.co/pro DOM dumps 2026-09-25, byte-identical textContent (8,145 chars) vs the 2026-09-21 run; 15/15 SKU price tokens matched.
  • Cross-references on this site: Carrd review (09-21 capture), Cal.com refund page (09-11), Tally refund page (09-11). Third-party corroboration: OnePageLove’s 2026 Carrd pricing writeup quotes the same downgrade-credit language.
  • Check date for all price/limit statements: 2026-09-25.

More of our Carrd guides: