Ask HN: What are your expectations for refund policies for online courses?
I've launched a product which I would categorize as 'online program' because it is not really a tech product and it's not a self-guided online course per sè, because it includes human guiding you throughout the whole online program, day-by-day.
Context: it's a program to help you build a 15-min morning routine in 8 weeks. My avatar is someone who doesn't have a very strong discipline and tends to procrastinate, therefore would benefit the most from a structured, guided program.
Now, I want to have some sort of the refund policy and make it as fair as possible. I am torn however between these options:
- Be super user-friendly (my preferred choice in most cases) and provide no-questions-asked refunds before the program starts and within the first 1 or 2 weeks of the program. - Be more firm and offer no refunds at all, because in this particular case, my avatar might have a tendency to "chicken-out" last minute and come up with an excuse to procrastinate again. But by not offering a refund, a user might end up getting into "loss aversion" and "sunk-costs" thinking - "oh well, if I paid for it, I might as well do it" and in a result, actually complete and really benefit from the program. So not offering refund might actually do good for tahe user. But then again - I can't assume there will be no legitimate reasons for refund requests...
As an online-citizen - what is your preferred choice?