Payment

If you intend to buy SparkChess but are having some questions, you’ll find answers here.

Can I switch from monthly to yearly, or from prepaid to recurring?

Sure. To switch from monthly to yearly, from your Premium Live account create a new Yearly subscription (using the same payment method). It will be listed as pending. Then cancel the previous monthly subscription. It will still give you access till the end of the billing period, at which point the new yearly subscription will kick in.

Switching from prepaid to recurring works similarly. Assuming your prepaid subscription is still in effect, purchase a new recurring subscription. It will remain in Pending state until the prepaid one expires, then it will become active.

My payment failed. What should I do?

Payments can fail for a variety of reasons and as a security measure we can’t display the actual reason when the failure occurs.

If your payment failed, please, please contact us as soon as possible. We’ll check with our payment processor.

Most common reasons for a failed transactions are:

Insufficient funds on the card
Expired card
Wrong 3D Secure code provided (for 3D Secure-enrolled cards)
Some fraud-prevention flag was raised.

You can try an alternative mean of payment – like GPay or PayPal, but please do contact us so we can clear up the situation.

What personal information do you collect?

As an EU-registered company, we take privacy very seriously.

We collect just enough information to provide the service to you. We need to collect your IP address. Email addresses are optional. When purchasing a subscription, we may also collect some device information for fraud prevention. And that’s it.

Is there more than one subscription type?

We introduced SparkChess Premium Live prepaid subscription in 2014 as a result to changes in Chrome Web Store. Users could purchase one-month, six-month, and one-year subscriptions. At the end of the period, users had to manually renew.

The system worked as an alternative to the download options for Windows and Mac.

As time passed, more and more users opted for the online service.

In 2025, we introduced a more streamlined subscription, that works the way virtually all subscriptions work – paid monthly or annually until canceled.

The old prepaid subscription remains available as fallback and for specific cases, such as promotions. If, for any reason, you’d prefer a prepaid subscription, please contact us. We’ll do our best to help.

Is SparkChess a downloadable product or a subscription service?

When it was introduced in 2008, SparkChess Pro was just a downloadable product for Windows and Mac.

Over the years, we discovered (the hard way), just how difficult maintaining such a product is: executables need to be signed (and code-signing certificates are costly), some stupid antiviruses block the downloads and we had to contact them and submit samples, users can’t find the downloaded files, upgrades are difficult, and so on.

We started a transition, first to prepaid subscriptions in 2014 and then to recurring ones in 2025. We believe they bring more value to our players, since with the same subscription they can play on any device, but we still maintain the download options, mostly for existing customers.

Do you have a special offer for schools or clubs?

Yes! SparkChess has been used in schools and chess clubs.

If you represent a school (public or private), chess club or any other educational organization, we’d be happy to talk.

We can offer volume discounts, special private playing areas in multiplayer, even rebranding.

You can also manage members, assign them to teams, allow autologin, and much more.

Is SparkChess Premium subscription-based? Are there recurring charges?

As SparkChess evolved over the years, so did the customer expectations and the choices available. Currently, there are three ways you can enjoy what SparkChess Premium has to offer:

Recurring Premium Live subscription
Pre-paid Premium Live subscription (legacy)
One-time purchase for Windows/Mac apps.

The Premium Live subscription will supersede the other choices.

Is the payment process secure?

Yes, the payment process is perfectly secure. We are PCI-DSS compliant. We do not store, process or transmit any credit card information. The payment process is handled by Braintree, a world-wide leader in electronic transactions.

The connection is secured with the highest-grade SSL encryption, rated ‘A’ by Qualys Labs and, as stated above, we don’t have access to the credit card info anyway. We only store your email and transaction ID, everything else is handled by Braintree.

We continually monitor and test our systems to make sure they are 100% safe. In addition, Braintree requires us to perform regular audits with Security Metrics, a company specialized in PCI-DSS certifications.