Cancellation and Refund

1. Withdrawal: 7 days, from your own dashboard

You can cancel your entry and get 100% of what you paid back within 7 calendar days of payment. It is self-service:

1. sign in at ioovc.org/dashboard with the e-mail you registered with;
2. on the entry you want to cancel, click to request a refund;
3. that's it: the refund is sent immediately and the entry is cancelled.

No justification, no approval, no e-mail to anyone. The date and time of the request are recorded, and you get a confirmation by e-mail.

If several entries were paid in the same checkout, the refund returns the whole payment and cancels all of them together — half a purchase cannot be returned.

2. When the money comes back

The refund is sent to Stripe, our processor, right away. How long it takes to show up is up to your card issuer, not us: usually 5 to 10 business days, sometimes only on the next statement. Because the charge is made in Brazilian reais, the amount you see back may differ slightly from the amount charged, by your issuer's exchange rate — a difference the organization neither receives nor controls.

If the dashboard button fails (it happens when our payment account balance is momentarily unavailable), write to contact@ioovc.org: we refund by hand and your entry stays active until then.

3. After the 7 days

Once the withdrawal window closes, requests go by e-mail to contact@ioovc.org and are considered case by case. We reply within 15 calendar days, and the request, its date and the decision are recorded.

A refund is due even outside the 7 days when:

• the organization cancels the edition (every paid entry is refunded in full);
• the Rules change materially after your entry and you disagree with the change;
• we fail to deliver the service — including an entry charged twice, in which case we refund the duplicate charge.

Outside those cases the entry is not refundable after 7 days, because from then on it takes a place in the competition and counts towards the Prize Ladder. None of this removes any right your local consumer law gives you.

4. What cancelling does

• The project leaves the competition. The entry is marked cancelled and is not judged — including when the project has already been submitted. Submitting does not prevent cancelling within the 7 days.
• A used coupon is not given back. If you registered with a discount, what comes back is what you actually paid. A single-use coupon already spent is not reissued; an affiliate coupon stops counting as a paid referral.
• Your account stays. You keep access to the dashboard and may enter again while registration is open, until October 31, 2026, at 11:59:59 p.m. Brasília time.
• The Prize Ladder. An entry cancelled before the close does not count towards the rung. After the close the rung is frozen and does not change — see section 9 of the Official Rules.

5. Card disputes

Before opening a chargeback, talk to us: the dashboard refund is faster and solves the same problem. A chargeback cancels the entry and removes the project from the competition, and an abusive dispute — competing and then disputing the charge — exposes the participant to the measures available to the organization.