If a creator accepts a paid custom request or Personalized Video on Brillay and then misses the delivery deadline, the payment is returned. Followers pay upfront, and a delivery window that closes with nothing delivered returns the follower's payment automatically. Custom Work lets you offer clearly scoped commissions and services: you set the price, the scope and the delivery time, and followers submit a brief and pay before you start. No monthly fee, you only pay a small platform fee when you get paid. 8% platform fee when a follower pays for work, 5% platform fee on tips and goals. Card processing is separate.
What actually happens when a creator misses a delivery deadline?
Followers pay before you do the work; you deliver on your own time.
Followers pay upfront, and the creator delivers later. If the creator declines or misses the deadline, the request closes and the follower keeps their money. Brillay caps every delivery window at 120 hours (5 days) by policy, so a missed deadline is caught quickly and the follower's money is returned automatically.
When a custom request or Personalized Video misses its deadline, the request closes and the follower keeps their money.
Do you have to ask for your money back, or does it happen automatically?
No. Brillay handles a missed delivery time for Custom Work or Personalized Videos at the deadline: the request closes, the follower keeps their money, and a support ticket, refund request, or bank dispute becomes unnecessary. Contacting the creator is optional and can resolve a late delivery faster.
Paid Questions use the reply time the creator sets, from 1 hour to 5 days. If the creator misses the reply deadline, the request closes and the follower keeps their money. Once a Custom Work or Personalized Video order has been delivered, its order page offers a Contact button for the creator, the direct path when the delivery looks incomplete or different from what was described. Paid Questions have no separate support conversation; the private thread is the whole exchange.
One caveat matters for anyone watching their statement: after the request closes, a line item can still show up on a statement beyond the same day. Card statements from some issuers and payment interfaces do not always update the moment a payment is returned, so a lingering line item can keep showing on a statement until the issuing bank drops it, on the bank's own timetable rather than Brillay's. Brillay's published policy makes the same point about money timing: "Refund timing is controlled by Stripe, the customer's bank, and the payment method".
How long can a creator take before it counts as non-delivery?
A creator sets the delivery time when building the offer, and Brillay caps that promised delivery time at up to 5 days, the maximum the delivery-time picker allows.
Three conditions define that cap. The creator chooses the window inside the 120-hour ceiling rather than Brillay setting it; it applies to Custom Work and Personalized Videos, while Paid Questions use their own creator-set reply window (1 hour to 5 days); and the deadline that counts is the one the creator promised on the listing. Because Brillay can change the available options, a creator should confirm the current picker values in the dashboard when creating an offer.
There is no separate, shorter "creator went quiet" clock layered on top of the delivery time: the deadline that defines an on-time delivery is the same deadline that defines a missed one. A creator can deliver early, deliver right up to the deadline, or decline the request outright rather than let it run out. For context on how unusual a five-day ceiling is, the Federal Trade Commission's Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule tells sellers that "If you make no shipment statement, you must have a reasonable basis for believing that you can ship within 30 days" (FTC business guidance) — a 30-day general baseline against Brillay's 120-hour product cap.
What's different if the creator never responded at all?
A creator who never engages with a request is a distinct scenario from one who accepted the order and then missed the finish line, even though both end with the follower receiving nothing. A Paid Question that gets zero response runs on Brillay's creator-set reply deadline, from 1 hour to 5 days, not a platform-fixed clock. A creator's silence can also come from something outside the delivery process altogether — see what happens to a creator's money if their account gets banned for that separate case.
That scenario is covered in detail in can you get a refund if a creator never responds. The short version: Paid Questions, Custom Work, and Personalized Videos each use the reply or delivery time the creator sets, up to 5 days.
What if your card was already charged and the creator still didn't deliver?
That depends on how the order ended. As Brillay's contact page explains, creators are independent sellers who handle delivery questions, corrections, and refund requests for their own orders — Brillay does not step in to reverse a payment on a supporter's request alone. A creator can choose to refund a tip, but a supporter's request does not reverse the payment automatically. The reverse situation, where a creator did deliver but the follower says otherwise, is covered separately in what to do if a follower claims they never got their order.
If that path doesn't resolve things, a card-network dispute is the formal backstop that exists independently of any seller's decision. Stripe, which handles Brillay's payments and payouts, describes how that backstop constrains the seller once a dispute is opened:
"You can't issue a refund outside the dispute process while the dispute is open." (Stripe, How disputes work)
The dispute path is slow by design. Stripe's documentation states that card networks typically allow cardholders to initiate disputes within 120 days of the original payment. Stripe also documents that a seller has usually 7-21 days to respond to a chargeback depending on the card network, and that the full dispute lifecycle from initiation to final decision can take 2-3 months to complete.
What can you do if the situation isn't resolved automatically?
If contacting the creator leads nowhere and a completed payment covered work that never arrived, the follower's next step is a formal dispute through their own card issuer, separate from anything the creator or Brillay decides. A cardholder should raise it promptly, because the governing US regulation sets a deadline measured from the billing statement.
Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, a billing-error notice must reach the card issuer "no later than 60 days after the creditor transmitted the first periodic statement that reflects the alleged billing error" (12 CFR § 1026.13(b)(1), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). That 60-day clock runs from the statement date rather than the purchase date, which makes it a narrower window than a card network's own 120-day dispute-filing period — so "there is still time" is not a safe assumption once a statement has gone out.
The resolution side is also regulated, and it is not fast. The same rule requires a creditor to comply with the billing-error resolution procedures "within 2 complete billing cycles (but in no event later than 90 days) after receiving a billing error notice" (12 CFR § 1026.13(c)(2)). The full mechanics of how a dispute proceeds, including evidence deadlines, are set by the card network and the issuing bank, not by the creator or by Brillay.
Does this kind of protection exist outside Brillay too?
Not usually in the same automatic form. On Brillay, a missed delivery deadline closes the request and the follower keeps their money, so there is no reclaim step to go through.
Escalation outside a platform is measured in weeks, not minutes. The Better Business Bureau tells complainants that a business "will be asked to respond in 14 calendar days from the date you filed the complaint" (BBB complaint process), and that is a request for a response rather than a resolution. Compared with a 14-day complaint acknowledgment or a 90-day regulatory resolution ceiling, closing the request at the deadline gives the shortest path available to a follower who never received the work.
Does the remedy differ depending on what you paid for?
Yes. Custom Work, Personalized Videos, and Paid Questions all carry a creator-set deadline — a delivery time (up to five days) for the first two, a reply window (1 hour to 5 days) for a Paid Question — so all three can end with the request closing and the follower keeping their money for non-delivery or non-reply. Tips have nothing to deliver in return, and Goals have nothing to ship, so neither has a delivery deadline to miss.
| Offer | When payment is charged | If delivery never happens |
|---|---|---|
| Paid Questions | Upfront, when the follower submits the question; the creator then has the reply time they set (1 hour to 5 days) | At an unanswered deadline inside that window, the request closes and the follower keeps their money |
| Custom Work / Personalized Videos | Upfront, when the follower submits the brief; the creator then has the delivery time they set, up to 5 days | At the deadline, an undelivered request closes and the follower keeps their money; an earlier decline closes it with the same outcome |
| Tips | Immediately at checkout, with no delivery owed | Not applicable — Tips let followers send a one-time thank-you, with nothing for you to deliver and no membership for them to join. |
| Goals | Immediately at checkout, as cash toward a stated goal | Not applicable — the money funds the creator's stated goal rather than a purchased item |
The early-decline case in the Custom Work row is worth spelling out: an early decline closes the request and the follower keeps their money, while refunding addresses a completed payment. For general context, Stripe's own documentation frames a similar distinction:
Cancelling a payment and refunding one are treated as separate actions there. (Stripe documentation)
An ordinary refund becomes possible after a completed payment, and Brillay's policy then applies: "Ordinary refunds are decided and initiated by the creator".
Frequently asked questions
Does Brillay charge my card the moment I pay for a custom request or Personalized Video?
Yes. The follower pays upfront when they submit the request; you deliver when you can.
What counts as "not delivering" versus a delivery I'm just unhappy with?
Missing the delivery deadline entirely — no file, message, or recording arriving inside the creator's stated delivery time, which is capped at up to 5 days — is different from receiving something and disliking the creator's style or tone. Brillay's policy states that "Subjective dissatisfaction, a change of mind, differences in personal taste, or dissatisfaction with a creator's natural style, tone, opinion, or presentation do not automatically entitle a customer to a refund".
How long does a leftover line item take to disappear from my statement?
The follower's money is returned at the deadline, but a statement can lag behind that, clearing on the issuing bank's own schedule. Card statements from some issuers do not always update right away, so a follower who still sees a lingering line item after a few days should ask their card issuer, not the creator.
Can a creator still deliver after the deadline passes?
A follower who still wants the work would place a new request, and a creator expecting to run late is better off communicating early or declining the original order.
What does Brillay charge to use a custom request or Personalized Video?
The price on the listing is what the follower pays; Brillay's platform fee comes out of the creator's side of that payment, at the rate quoted at the top of this page, and Stripe's card-processing charge is a separate cost from that fee. There is no follower minimum for a creator to offer Custom Work or Personalized Videos, and payments and payouts run through Stripe once a creator completes onboarding — a payout can also stall for an unrelated reason, such as incorrect bank account details on file.
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