Refund policy

The six situations

Each row is a separate promise with its own section below. The deadlines are ours to hit, and we publish how often we hit them.

The $1.88 deposit

1. What it is. A refundable reservation that holds a numbered place in the register of 1,500 and gets you into the 48 hour window before the campaign opens to everyone else. It is not a purchase of a seat, and it is not an investment.
2. Ask and it comes back. Email us, say the word refund, and we return all $1.88 within five business days. You do not have to explain, and asking does not cost you your place unless you want it to.
3. It is credited in full against the seat price if you buy a seat.
4. If we walk away from the project, every deposit is refunded automatically, without anyone asking, and we post the total refunded.
5. Why the amount is odd. A card charge is the only honest measure of intent, and $1.88 is small enough that nobody is out of pocket if this goes nowhere. Card fees eat most of it, so the deposit is not revenue to us in any meaningful sense.

If the campaign never funds

Seats are sold through Kickstarter on an all-or-nothing basis. If the goal is not met, nobody's card is charged for a seat. Not partially, not provisionally. That mechanic belongs to Kickstarter, not to us, and it is one of the reasons we chose the platform over taking money directly.

Until the money reaches us, your pledge is governed by Kickstarter's own terms. This policy takes over at the point the funds arrive and a seat exists.

If we cancel the campaign mid-flight, the same thing happens: no charges, and every $1.88 deposit comes back within 14 days of us saying so publicly.

The six month deadline

If the node is not serving members within six months of the campaign closing, ask for your money back and you get all of it.

1. The clock is six months from the day the campaign closes, not from the day the funds land, not from the day we place the order.
2. We cannot extend this deadline by announcement. Only you can waive it, for your own seat, in writing.
3. Hardware lead times slip. If NVIDIA's date moves, you hear it the week we hear it, with the new date and the option to leave. Going quiet during a delay is how crowdfunded hardware projects fail, and we would rather refund a hundred people than lose the room.
4. A refund under this section is the full seat price, including the $1.88, and it is paid within 30 days of the deadline passing.
5. What actually backs it, which is the part most projects will not print. Before the machine is paid for, this promise is backed by cash we are holding and it is simply a transfer. After the machine is paid for, most of the money is a machine sitting in a crate. If enough of you ask at once and the cash is gone, the machine is sold on the mechanical process in section 13 of the terms and the proceeds plus whatever remains in escrow are paid out in equal shares, capped at what each of you paid. We would rather write that sentence now than have you discover it on the day.
6. Which is why the order matters. We do not release the hardware payment until the campaign has funded and the delivery date is contracted in writing. The monthly transparency post shows what has been committed and what is still cash, so you can see which version of the promise you are holding at any given moment rather than taking our word for it.

Downtime is repaid in time

An outage does not generate a cash refund. It adds days to the end of the term, for all 1,500 members at once, which is why the term is counted in node uptime rather than on a calendar.

The reason is arithmetic rather than stinginess. Paying out cash for a bad afternoon drains the reserve that backs the real refund promise, and it drains it for everyone. Paying in time costs the members nothing and costs us the only thing we have to give, which is more service.

The mechanism is in section 10 of the terms: a 99.0% monthly target, and three service days added for every percentage point missed, applied automatically. Nobody files a claim. If the node cannot ultimately deliver the 36 months at all, section 06 below takes over.

If the node cannot continue

If the machine cannot be repaired or kept running and we are forced to sell it before the 36 months are delivered, the sale is the refund. You get an equal share of what it raises, plus whatever is left in the escrow.

Why the formula changed

An earlier draft of this page promised a fraction of the seat price: 6 months lost out of 36 meant $883.33 back. That version was worse than it looked, and the arithmetic is the reason. Six months lost across 400 members is $353,332 of claims against a $125,000 escrow. A promise that runs out at member 141 is not a promise, it is a queue.

So the guarantee is written against the thing that actually holds the value. The machine is what the money bought, the machine is what gets sold, and the money it raises goes back to the people who paid for it, in equal parts. Nobody has to trust that a reserve is big enough, because the reserve is not what stands behind this.

1. Only for a genuine stop. Not a bad week, not a failed GPU, not a slow month. Outages are repaid in service days under section 10 of the terms, and an outage past 48 hours bridges to rented GPUs first. This section is the end of the road, not a bad afternoon.
2. Why equal shares. A member who loses 20 months and a member who loses 4 bought the identical seat on the identical machine at the identical price. Weighting the payout by how far each of them happened to get would quietly punish whoever the calendar treated better, and there is no version of that which is fairer than splitting it 1,500 ways.
3. The escrow still exists, still ring-fenced, still published monthly. In a stop it is added to the sale money rather than spent first. Between now and then it pays the individual exits in section 07, where a member leaves while the node keeps serving everyone else.
4. The sale is the same mechanical process as the end of term: a published listing period, a minimum number of bids, a closed list of deductible costs capped at 8% of gross, proceeds straight to attorney escrow, and the full dossier published before a dollar moves. Section 13 of the terms has the whole thing.
5. We are not going to quote you a figure. The refund is whatever a used DGX B300 sells for on that date, divided 1,500 ways. Publishing a projection would be a guess dressed up as a promise, and it would also be the kind of number that turns a service licence into something a regulator reads differently.
6. The one piece of luck in the structure. A machine that stops in year one is nearly new and sells for more than one that stops in year three, so the payout tends to be largest exactly when the loss is largest. That is a happy accident of how hardware depreciates, not a promise, and nobody should read it as a reason a failure would be a good outcome. It would not be. It would mean the thing we set out to build did not work.
7. Capped, always. No payout under this section, section 07, or section 13 of the terms can exceed what you paid for your seat, and they cannot exceed it in combination either. A seat cannot return a gain in any scenario. That cap is why a seat is a prepaid service and not an investment, and it is the reason the word profit does not appear anywhere in these documents as something you might get.

If we change the terms

A material change to the terms needs 30 days of notice. If the change makes the service materially worse for you and you tell us you do not accept it, your seat ends and you are refunded for the remainder of your term at $5,300 × (months remaining ÷ 36), rounded up to the whole month, paid from the escrow within 30 days.

This one is priced against the seat rather than against the machine, because the node keeps running for the other 399. You are leaving a service that still works, so you get back the part of it you will not use. Section 06 is the opposite case, where nothing is left to use.

Price and term length cannot change at all, so neither can ever be the reason you use this section.

What we do not refund

1. Change of mind, after the first 14 days. Section 09 gives you two weeks from the day you buy to walk away for no reason. After that the seat is not returnable on a change of mind, because a machine was bought outright on the strength of you and 399 others saying you wanted one. Everything in this section is subject to the statutory rights in section 19 of the terms, which we cannot and do not try to write around.
2. Months you did not use. Idle time is spent time. The machine was up and reserved for you, and section 04 of the terms says the same thing at more length.
3. A seat terminated for confirmed resale. No refund and no rebate. It is the one breach with no second chance.
4. Dissatisfaction with the model. We publish benchmarks before you buy and you can read them. If the model is worse than you hoped, the answer is the upgrade vote, not a refund.
5. The completion rebate is not a refund. It is a separate end-of-term payment under section 13, and receiving one does not reduce any refund you are owed.

The 14 days after you buy

You get 14 days from the day you buy a seat to change your mind for no reason at all. In the EU and the UK that is a statutory right on a distance sale. Everywhere else we give you the same window on the same terms, because operating two rules for one product would cost more than the rule does.

1. Before launch, you get everything. If the node has not served you yet, and during the campaign it has not, cancelling inside the window returns the whole seat price including the $1.88. Nothing is kept and nothing is deducted.
2. After launch, we keep only the days you had. The seat price divided by 1,095 days, times the days served, rounded down. On a $5,300 seat that is about $4.84 a day, so a cancellation on day 10 costs you roughly $48. There is no cancellation fee on top, because there would be nothing for one to pay for.
3. How to do it. Email contact@nodemmunity.com and say you are cancelling. Any clear wording counts. If you would rather use a form, copy this and send it: I cancel my contract for one seat, ordered on [date], name, address, date. You are not required to use it and we will not ask you why.
4. When the money moves. Within 14 days of us hearing from you, by the route it arrived, with no bank charge from our side.
5. What it is not. A rolling exit. After the 14 days, sections 01 to 08 are what govern, and they are deliberately specific about which situations pay and which do not.
6. Nothing here reduces it. If a clause anywhere in these three documents appears to cut this window short, the clause loses. Section 19 of the terms says the same thing with the rest of your statutory rights alongside it.

How to ask

1. Email contact@nodemmunity.com from the address on the reservation or the account, and say what you want back. There is no form to fill in and no retention call.
2. We reply within five business days with a yes, or with a reason and a named person to argue with.
3. Money goes back the way it came, to the card or account that paid. If that route is dead, we will find another one with you.
4. Every refund is logged, and the monthly transparency post carries the count and the total. Never the names.
5. Bank charges on our side are ours. You get the full figure in the table.

If you disagree with us

Tell us before you tell your bank. A chargeback on a $1.88 deposit costs everyone more than the deposit, and on a seat it freezes money that belongs to 399 other people while it is investigated. If you have already filed one on a deposit, we will not contest it.

Beyond that, section 18 of the terms governs, and you should read it rather than take a summary of it. It asks for 30 days of a genuine attempt to sort things out first, and after that it sends a claim to individual arbitration rather than to court, with a class action waiver attached. It also gives you 30 days from buying your seat to opt out of that whole section by one email, at no cost to anything else about your seat, and it does not apply at all where the law where you live does not allow a pre-dispute arbitration agreement against a consumer, which includes much of Europe and the United Kingdom.

We are not going to pretend that clause is a benefit to you. It is the standard protection a company with 1,500 prepaid members takes, and section 18 states plainly what it costs you and how to decline it. Nothing in either document takes away a right your local consumer law gives you, and small claims court stays open either way.

The status of this draft

Published as a draft while the only money in play is a $1.88 deposit, which is the point: you can read the refund terms before there is anything to refund. The escrow figures come from the published master plan of July 2026 and are set for real when the campaign funds.

Draft 2, published 31 July 2026, adds section 09, adds the two clauses in section 04 that say what actually stands behind the six month promise once the hardware is paid for, and corrects section 11, which in draft 1 described a dispute clause the terms no longer contain. Nothing in what gets refunded, or when, has changed.

If a clause here reads as a loophole, say so at contact@nodemmunity.com and we will close it or explain why it is not one.