Refund Policy

The short version

• Every feature of ValTerra for Autodesk 3ds Max is free to try for 30 days, and the Lite tier stays free after that, so you can decide before you spend anything.
• If you buy and it turns out not to fit, write to us within 14 days of your purchase and we refund the software license fee in full.
• One email is enough. You do not have to justify the decision or fill in a form.
• The money goes back through Paddle, our merchant of record, to the card or account you paid with.
• Your rights under consumer law sit on top of this policy. They are not replaced by it.

Try it before you pay

The trial is a full trial: 30 days, every feature enabled, no card required, no watermark on your output. When the trial ends, ValTerra Lite stays free: the same workflow at reduced fidelity — Medium (8 m) geometry, Half-resolution textures, 1080p captures — with terrain at full quality and schematic city at full quality within 4 km² per OpenStreetMap request (the trial and a paid seat have no fixed area cap), and still no watermarks. One feature is paid rather than reduced: Lite builds the Daylight system of Autodesk 3ds Max in place of the ValTerra Sun, and a ValTerra Sun already in a scene keeps working.

That is deliberate. We would rather you find out that ValTerra does not suit your pipeline while it is costing you nothing. If the trial will not install or run on your workstation, write to us before buying and we will sort it out first.

The money-back guarantee

If you buy a ValTerra license and it is not what you needed, ask us for a refund within 14 days of the purchase date. We refund the full amount of the transaction, including any tax Paddle collected at checkout.

The guarantee covers:

• perpetual licenses of any tier, bought as a single seat or as several at once;
• additional seats and tier upgrades added to an earlier purchase;
• maintenance renewals, with the one limit described under “What is not refundable”.

Using the software during those 14 days does not void the guarantee. Evaluating it properly is the entire point of the window. An order for several seats is refunded as a whole, and the refund ends every key issued under that order; we do not refund single keys out of an order.

How to ask

Email [email protected] with “Refund request” in the subject line, and include:

• the email address you used at checkout;
• the Paddle order or receipt number, which is on the receipt Paddle sent you;
• one of the license keys from the order, if you already activated any;
• optionally, what went wrong. That is useful to us, not a condition of the refund.

We reply within two business days and, once the request is approved, submit it to Paddle within five business days. We work Kyiv time and answer on working days.

If you cannot find your receipt, Paddle’s buyer support can locate the transaction and pass your request on to us.

Please write to us before opening a dispute with your bank. A chargeback freezes the transaction on Paddle’s side and normally takes longer than simply asking.

How the money comes back

Paddle is the merchant of record for every ValTerra purchase. Paddle is the seller named on your receipt, it takes the payment, and it issues the refund. Refunds go back to the original payment method, in the currency you were charged. We cannot send a refund to a different card, account or person.

Paddle starts the refund as soon as we approve the request. How quickly it appears on your statement is decided by your bank or card issuer, not by us. If your currency was converted at purchase, the amount you see back may differ a little because the exchange rate moved. That difference belongs to the bank; we do not deduct anything.

A refund that reaches us from Paddle’s side — one you asked Paddle’s buyer support for, or a chargeback your bank raised — ends the license in the same way as one you asked us for: see “What happens to your license key” below. If a chargeback is later reversed, we restore every key of the order, and each key is activated again on its machine.

What is not refundable

A maintenance renewal you have already used. A renewal falls under the same 14-day window, but only until you install a release published under the renewed term. Once you have taken an update that the renewal paid for, the renewal has done its job and we do not refund it. Your perpetual license is unaffected either way: it keeps working on every version released during the term you paid for.

Purchases older than 14 days. After the window the guarantee no longer applies. Write to us anyway. If something is genuinely broken, we would rather fix it, extend your maintenance, or find another way to make it right than win an argument about a calendar.

Free tiers. The trial, the Lite tier and educational licenses cost nothing, so there is nothing to refund.

Charges from other companies. Some ValTerra features run on your own Google Maps Platform key, under your own agreement with Google, and Google bills you directly. That money never reaches us, so we cannot refund it. You manage or stop that billing in your own Google Cloud account.

Repeated use of the guarantee. We may decline a refund when the same buyer keeps purchasing and refunding the same product.

Your rights under consumer law

This policy is a commercial promise we make on top of the law. Nothing in it limits rights you have as a consumer.

If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, you normally have a 14-day right of withdrawal for digital content bought online. Your contract of sale is with Paddle, so that right is exercised against Paddle, and Paddle’s Buyer Terms (opens in a new tab) and Paddle’s Refund Policy (opens in a new tab) set out how it is exercised and what happens once digital content has been made available to you. Your license keys and the installer are available right after payment. We do not ask you to waive anything at checkout, and nothing in this policy shortens the statutory right.

In practice this changes nothing for you. Our own 14-day guarantee runs from the purchase date and does not depend on the statutory right, so the window is the same either way. Business customers have no consumer right of withdrawal; the guarantee still applies to them.

What happens to your license key

When a refund is approved, the license ends — every key issued under the refunded order, not only the ones you activated — and your right to use the paid tier ends with it. We ask you to either uninstall the plug-in or keep working in ValTerra Lite, which stays free, on every machine the order covered.

Here is exactly what happens technically. Each key in your order has a serial number, and so does every machine a key was activated on. When the refund is approved we place all of those serial numbers on a small public list that the plug-in reads whenever it checks for a new version. A machine that reads the list drops to Lite, and none of the keys you were emailed will activate anywhere else, because our server answers “revoked”. That is the whole mechanism, and it has a limit we would rather name than hide: a machine that is kept off the internet never reads the list, so nothing on our side reaches it. What ends there is the permission, not the file. Continuing to use the paid tier after a refund is a breach of the license agreement, not a loophole.

Work you already produced stays yours. A refund does not reach back into renders, panoramas, cameras or scene files you have already made.

If you decide to buy again later, you buy at the price listed on that day. A Founders price that has closed cannot be reopened by refunding and re-purchasing.

Who you are buying from

ValTerra for Autodesk 3ds Max is published by Valerii Nikulin, sole proprietor (FOP) registered in Ukraine, trading as Shall We Art. Purchases are processed by Paddle as merchant of record: Paddle’s Buyer Terms govern the transaction itself, and this policy describes how we handle refunds within them.

Refund requests and questions: [email protected].