EU consumer protection and our 14-day window

Most agencies bury their refund policy in a footer link nobody reads. We put ours in the flow. There's a reason for that, and it isn't marketing theatre. It's because EU consumer law actually applies to us, even though we operate from Minsk, because most of the people who hire us live in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, and other EU member states. So we built our refund window around Directive 2011/83/EU on consumer rights, specifically Article 16(a), which governs what happens when a digital service starts before the standard 14-day withdrawal period ends.

This page explains what that means in plain English, where the law has sharp edges most agencies pretend don't exist, and how we structure our work so the protection is real rather than decorative.

The directive in one paragraph

Directive 2011/83/EU has been in force since 13 June 2014, with substantive amendments through Directive (EU) 2019/2161, effective 28 May 2022. The core idea: if you buy a service from a business at a distance — online, by phone, through a contact form — you get 14 calendar days to change your mind and get your money back. No reason required. Article 9 sets the window. Article 14 covers reimbursement. The trader has 14 days from your withdrawal notice to refund the full amount using the same payment method you originally used.

That sounds simple. It isn't, because of Article 16(a).

Article 16(a) and why it matters for ad campaigns

Article 16(a) creates an exception. The withdrawal right disappears for services that have been fully performed if performance began with the consumer's prior explicit consent and the consumer acknowledged they would lose the withdrawal right once the service was completed. Article 16(c) does something similar for digital content delivered on a non-tangible medium.

For an agency running paid social or paid search on someone's behalf, this is the whole game. The moment we spend a single euro on Meta or Google buying impressions, the service has started. That spend is irrecoverable. We can't un-show an ad. We can't claw budget back from Meta after the auction has cleared. So if we let a client cancel after we'd already burned through 40% of their campaign budget, somebody is eating that loss. Either we eat it, which kills a small agency fast, or the client eats it after thinking they were protected. Neither outcome is honest.

Article 16(a) gives us the mechanism to handle this properly: explicit consent before performance starts, acknowledgment that the withdrawal right is waived for the portion that's been performed.

How our 14-day window actually works

Here is the structure, and it deliberately leaves the consumer protection intact for everything that hasn't been spent yet:

1. Strategy and setup phase — fully refundable within 14 days. If you pay us, change your mind two days later, and we haven't launched anything live, you get 100% back. No deductions. We refund through the original payment channel within 7 working days, faster than the 14 days Article 14 allows us.
2. Pre-launch consent step — before we push the campaign live and before the first euro hits Meta or Google, we send a written confirmation. It states the exact launch date, the daily budget, and the fact that ad spend already incurred cannot be refunded once it's been billed by the platform. You confirm in writing. Only then do we start.
3. Mid-campaign withdrawal — you can still cancel at any point. We refund the agency fee proportionally for the unused service window and we pause spend immediately. Money already spent at Meta or Google is gone; that part we cannot recover and we won't pretend otherwise.
4. Post-campaign — once the agreed campaign window has fully run, the service is performed under Article 16(a) and the withdrawal right is exhausted. You still have the standard non-conformity remedies if we didn't deliver what we agreed to.

The full text of how this maps to a specific engagement lives on the refund policy page, with the exact percentages and timelines.

The contrarian bit

Most contest-promotion agencies advertise "money-back guarantees" that are worth less than the pixels they're written on. The guarantee usually depends on hitting a vote count, which is precisely the metric the agency does not control. Voters control it. The contest platform controls its anti-fraud detection. Algorithm changes control reach. If an agency promises "your money back if you don't win," they're either lying, planning to refund nobody, or planning to use methods that violate the contest's terms of service and get your entry disqualified.

We think a refund window tied to service delivery is the only honest version of this. Did we run the campaign we agreed to run, on the dates we said, with the targeting and budget we said? That's a question with a verifiable answer. Did you win the contest? That's a question with too many other variables for any agency to legitimately guarantee.

So our 14-day window protects you against us not doing our job. It does not, and cannot, protect you against the contest jury's taste or the other 312 contestants.

What this looks like in practice

One example from late 2025, anonymized. A participant in a regional photography contest in Wielkopolskie voivodeship signed up with us on a Tuesday, paid the strategy fee, and called us 36 hours later to say a family member had unexpectedly offered to fund a much larger campaign through a different agency. We hadn't launched yet. We refunded 100% within 4 working days, including the 23 EUR payment processor fee we'd already absorbed on our end. No argument, no retention attempt, no "are you sure?" loop. That's what the directive requires, and it's also just how we'd want to be treated.

A different case, same year: a client paid for a 21-day campaign, we launched after written consent, and on day 9 they asked to cancel because they'd decided to withdraw from the contest entirely. Of the 21 days, we had run 9. We refunded the unused 12 days of agency fee, prorated. We could not refund the ad spend Meta had already billed (roughly 41% of the total budget at that point). The client knew this going in because it was in the pre-launch confirmation email. There was nothing to dispute.

Why we won't promise more than this

Here are things we will not do, because they would either mislead you or violate the directive's spirit:

• We will not offer a "100% money-back guarantee, no questions asked, anytime" because that's not financially possible for a real agency that pre-funds ad spend on a client's behalf, and any agency offering it is either subsidizing it from somewhere else or planning to refuse the refund when you ask.
• We will not refund ad spend that's already been billed by Meta or Google. That money has left our account and entered theirs. Article 16(a) exists specifically because the law recognizes this reality for digital services.
• We will not tie refunds to contest outcomes. If we did that, we'd be incentivized to overpromise to win the work, and you'd have no recourse when reality didn't match the pitch.
• We will not work with clients who want guaranteed vote counts, because the only way to "guarantee" those is to buy them, and that's a separate set of problems we describe on the services page.

Where Belarus-based operations fit in

Honest disclosure: we're not established in the EU. We're in Minsk. The directive technically binds traders established in the EU, but EU consumer law also applies under the Rome I Regulation when a trader directs activities to consumers in EU member states, which we do. We chose to apply the 14-day framework voluntarily and contractually, not because a Belarusian court would necessarily enforce it against us, but because EU consumers shouldn't have to think about jurisdiction when shopping for a service marketed in their language.

This also means our contracts specify Polish law as the governing law for clients in Poland, and the consumer's habitual residence law for other EU member states, with the seat of arbitration in Warsaw. Yes, that's more legal scaffolding than a small agency usually bothers with. We did it because if the protection is going to be real, it has to be enforceable somewhere convenient for the consumer, not somewhere convenient for us.

The bit about explicit consent

Article 16(a) only works if consent is genuinely explicit. A pre-ticked checkbox does not count — the Court of Justice of the European Union settled that in Planet49 (Case C-673/17) on 1 October 2019, in the context of cookies but with reasoning that extends to other digital consent contexts. The amendments under Directive (EU) 2019/2161 reinforced this for distance contracts generally.

So our pre-launch confirmation is a separate email, with a separate reply required from you, where you actively type confirmation rather than clicking a single button. It's slightly more friction than a one-click flow. We think the friction is the point. If you're about to authorize us to start spending money on your behalf, you should feel the moment of authorization, not slide past it.

Our full intake sequence is documented on the process page, step by step, including which emails go when.

What the 14 days are actually for

Article 9's withdrawal right exists because EU lawmakers, going back to the original Distance Selling Directive 97/7/EC, recognized that buying things you can't physically inspect carries an information asymmetry the consumer can't fully resolve before purchase. Fourteen days gives you time to read what you signed up for, ask follow-up questions, and back out without penalty if the reality doesn't match what you understood.

For an agency engagement, that's exactly the right framing. You can't really tell from our website whether we'll be responsive, whether our reporting is clear, whether we communicate in a way that works for you. The 14 days give you a real-world test period. We'd rather lose a client in week one than have an unhappy one in week three.

One thing we got wrong

In our first version of the refund flow, back in early 2024, we required clients to send withdrawal notices through a specific online form. The directive allows withdrawal by "any unequivocal statement," so requiring a specific channel was technically out of compliance. A client pointed this out, politely. We changed it within a week. Now any clear written notice — email, message through our contact form, even a WhatsApp message to the account manager — counts as a valid withdrawal notice and starts the refund clock.

We mention this because it's the kind of thing small agencies usually quietly fix and never acknowledge. The fix matters more than the original mistake, but pretending the mistake didn't happen would be its own kind of dishonesty.

If you want to read more

The directive itself is the best source — the consolidated text on EUR-Lex linked above is in plain enough language that you don't need a lawyer to follow it. The European Commission's guidance document on the directive, last updated December 2021, walks through the trickier provisions including Article 16(a) with examples. For Polish consumers specifically, the implementing statute is the Act of 30 May 2014 on consumer rights (Ustawa o prawach konsumenta), available on isap.sejm.gov.pl.

If anything on this page contradicts what you read in your engagement letter with us, the engagement letter governs and we'll fix the page. If anything contradicts the directive itself, the directive governs and we'll fix both. Questions about specific scenarios are best handled directly; the contact page has the fastest channels, and we usually reply within one working day.