What these terms cover
These terms apply to thecheernote.com and to every card you order through it. By browsing the site, making an account, or placing an order, you're accepting them.
Cheernote is operated from Karachi, Pakistan. Where we say “we” or “us” we mean Cheernote. Where we say “you” we mean whoever is using the site or placing the order.
Our Privacy Policy sits alongside these terms and explains what we do with your information. Reading both gives you the full picture.
What we actually sell
We're not an e-card service. You design a real postcard on our site, we print it, we hand-paste a postage stamp on it, and we put it in the post to whoever you're sending it to.
Every card is 5 × 7 inches, printed on roughly 300 gsm cardstock with dye-based ink, and sent inside a strong case envelope. Card artwork is created by artists we work with.
You can personalise the card with your own message, choose from 53 postage stamps across five categories, and add an optional gift card. We also include a short message for the recipient from the Cheernote team.
So what you're buying from us is a printing and posting service for a physical card. The card itself is yours to send; the design on it stays with us and our artists.
One order covers one card. There's no basket, so a few cards means going through checkout a few times.
Your account
You can browse the whole site without an account, but you'll need one to pay — checkout asks you to sign in first. Your account is also where your past orders, reminders, address book, favourites and saved drafts live.
A few simple rules:
- Give us accurate details, and keep your email address up to date so we can reach you about an order.
- Keep your sign-in to yourself. You can sign in with a password, a one-time code sent by email, or your Google account, whichever you prefer.
- One account per person. Please don't share an account or set one up in someone else's name.
- If you think someone else has got into your account, email us straight away and we'll help you lock it down.
You must be old enough to enter a contract with us and to make a payment. If you're using someone else's card or account with their permission, that's between you and them.
We may suspend or close an account that's being used to break these terms.
Prices and what you pay
All our prices are in Pakistani Rupees and shown as Rs.
Right now every card design costs Rs 500, and postage is charged at Rs 150. So a typical order comes to Rs 650.
Checkout shows you the full breakdown before you pay: the card, the postage, any gift card you've added, any discount, and the total. Gift cards can be added at Rs 500, Rs 1,000, Rs 2,000 or Rs 5,000, on top of the card and postage.
Prices can change over time, and so can our postage rates. The price you're shown at checkout is the price you pay for that order. A change never applies retrospectively to an order you've already placed.
Cheernote is set up for addresses in Pakistan today. One flat Pakistan postage rate is charged on every order, whatever the destination, and there's no faster or international option to choose at checkout. If you need a card sent outside Pakistan, email us before you order and we'll tell you honestly whether we can help and what it would cost.
If a price is obviously wrong because of a technical error, we'll tell you before we print anything, and you can either confirm at the correct price or have your money back.
Payment
Payment is taken at checkout. We use Stripe to process it, and your card details go straight into Stripe's own secure fields. We never see or store your card number. All we keep is the amount, the currency and Stripe's reference for the payment.
Your order is confirmed once the payment has gone through. Until then it isn't in our print queue, so if a payment fails, nothing is printed and nothing is posted.
We'll send your confirmation by email, and the order will appear in your account.
What you're responsible for
Two things are genuinely down to you, and both matter a lot once a card is in the post.
First, the address. Please check the recipient's name, street, city and postal code carefully before you pay. We print what you give us. If an address is wrong or incomplete, the card may go astray, and we can't get it back once it's with the postal service.
Second, the message. Whatever you write is yours, and you're responsible for it. Please keep it something we'd be comfortable printing and the postal service would be comfortable carrying.
That means we can't print anything that is:
- Unlawful, or that would get you or us into legal trouble.
- Hateful or abusive towards a person or a group.
- Threatening, intimidating or harassing.
- Obscene or sexually explicit.
- Someone else's copyrighted work, or words you don't have the right to use.
If a card crosses that line, we'll refuse to print it and refund you. We're not trying to police what you say to your friends. The overwhelming majority of cards never come close to this, and we mention it only so you know where we stand.
Please also don't use Cheernote to send anonymous messages meant to upset or frighten someone.
When we can refuse or cancel an order
We may refuse or cancel an order if the message breaks the rules above, if the address looks unusable, if we can't get the card printed for a reason outside our control, or if something has clearly gone wrong with the order or the payment.
If we refuse or cancel, we refund you in full to the same payment method, and we'll email you to explain why.
How printing really looks
Two honest things about physical printing that are worth knowing before your card arrives.
Colours on a screen and colours on paper are never an exact match. Your screen makes light; a printed card reflects it. So the shade you see on your phone can sit a little differently on the cardstock. That's normal and isn't a fault.
And because a real person hand-pastes the postage stamp onto every card, its position varies a little from card to card. We think that's part of the charm rather than a defect.
If a card genuinely comes out wrong, though, that's a different matter, and the section below covers it.
Posting and delivery
We print your card, paste the stamp on it and hand it to the postal service. From that point the card is travelling with Pakistan Post or a courier, and it's out of our hands.
Standard post inside Pakistan usually takes 3 to 5 business days once it's been posted. That's an estimate, not a guarantee, and it runs from the day we post your card rather than the day you paid.
You can also choose a send date at checkout, and we'll hold the card and post it on that day. If you're working to an occasion, that's usually a better tool than ordering early and hoping.
Delivery can take longer around Eid, public holidays and other busy periods, and weather or local disruption can slow things down too. We'll always tell you what we know if you ask.
Your order moves through four stages in your account — Received, Printing, Posted and Delivered — so you can see when we printed your card and when it went out. What we can't give you is a postal tracking number, so once it's Posted we know as much as you do.
Changing or cancelling your order
Cards get printed in batches, so how much we can change depends entirely on whether yours has been printed yet.
Before it's printed, we can usually stop or amend it, including the message or the address. Email support@thecheernote.com as soon as you can, with your order details, and we'll check where your card is and tell you honestly. If we stop it, we refund you.
Once your card has been printed, stamped and handed to the post, we can't change or cancel it. The card exists, the stamp is on it, and it's on its way. If we can't stop it in time, we'll say so rather than leave you wondering.
Because each card is printed to order with your own message on it, it isn't something we can resell, so we can't take it back once it's made.
If something goes wrong
Email support@thecheernote.com and tell us what happened. A photo helps if the card arrived damaged or misprinted.
Where the fault is ours, we'll reprint your card and repost it at our cost. If you'd rather have your money back than a reprint, tell us and we'll sort that out instead. Either way you shouldn't be out of pocket for our mistake.
“Ours” covers things like a card printed with the wrong message, the wrong artwork, poor print quality, or a card we posted to the wrong address after you gave us the right one.
If a card is damaged in the post or never turns up, get in touch and we'll look into it with you. We can't control what happens once a card leaves us, but we'd rather reprint and repost than argue about whose fault the postal service is.
If a card went astray because the address we were given was wrong or incomplete, we'll still help. We can reprint and repost to a corrected address, though we may need to charge for the new card and its postage.
We haven't set a deadline for telling us about a problem. Sooner is better while we can still check our print records, but please just get in touch when you notice.
Gift cards
A gift card from us isn't a separate plastic card in the envelope. It's printed onto the postcard itself as a QR code. The recipient scans the code and follows the instructions on screen to redeem it.
The gift cards come from partner brands, and you can see who they are on our Gift Cards page. Once your card is printed, the QR code is fixed, so we can't swap the brand or the amount afterwards.
Redemption happens on the brand's side. Whatever that brand sets — its own terms, and an expiry if there is one — is theirs rather than ours. We choose our partners carefully, but we can't control their terms or how long a brand keeps its offer running.
If a QR code doesn't work when the recipient tries it, email us and we'll help you chase it with the brand. We should be straight with you though: we can't make a brand honour a code or extend an expiry.
Gift cards can't be exchanged for cash by you or the recipient.
Discount codes
- One discount code per order. Codes don't stack.
- Codes have no cash value and can't be exchanged for money.
- A code may have its own conditions, such as an expiry date or a minimum order.
- We check every code when you use it, so a mistyped, expired or already-used code won't apply.
- We can withdraw or change a code at any time, though never on an order you've already paid for.
- If a code was clearly obtained or used unfairly, we may cancel the order and refund you.
Artwork, words and who owns what
The card designs, the stamp illustrations, our name, our logo and the site itself belong to us or to the artists we work with. When you buy a card you're buying that card to send. You're not getting a licence to reuse the artwork.
So please don't copy, reprint, resell or use our designs in your own products, and don't scrape the site or reproduce its content elsewhere. If you'd like to use one of our designs for something, just ask us.
Your message stays yours. We don't claim ownership of it, and we won't use your words in our own marketing.
You do give us the narrow permission we need to do the job, which is to store your message, print it onto your card, and post that card. Nothing more.
If you tell us something about how we could do things better, we may act on it, and neither of us will owe the other anything for that.
Reminders
Reminders are there to nudge you before a birthday or an occasion, with a lead time you set, so you have a few days to order. Ours defaults to seven days ahead.
Please treat them as a helpful nudge and not a guarantee. Emails can be delayed, filtered into spam, or fail to send for reasons neither of us can see. Dates you enter are only as accurate as the details you typed.
If a date really matters, keep it in your own calendar too. We can't be responsible for a missed occasion because a reminder didn't reach you.
The limits of what we're responsible for
We take real care over your card, and if we get something wrong we'll put it right, as set out above. What we can't do is take on the wider consequences of a card arriving late or not at all.
So, put plainly: if something goes wrong with an order, what we'll do is reprint and repost your card, or refund what you paid us for it. We won't be liable beyond that for things like a missed birthday, disappointment, lost time or business costs. Our responsibility for any one order is limited to what you paid us for it.
We're also not responsible for delays or damage caused by the postal service, for an address that turned out to be wrong, for how a partner brand handles a gift card redemption, or for internet or payment provider outages we don't control.
We do our best to keep the site working and accurate, but we can't promise it will never be down or never contain a mistake. If you spot something wrong, please tell us.
None of this takes away any rights you have under Pakistani consumer law that can't be signed away. Where the law gives you more than these terms do, the law wins.
Which law applies
Cheernote is operated from Karachi, Pakistan, and these terms are governed by the law of Pakistan.
If there's a disagreement, please email us first. Almost everything gets sorted out with one honest exchange, and we'd much rather fix your card than argue about it.
If these terms change
We'll update these terms from time to time, usually because something about the service has changed, and we'll show the date they were last updated at the top of this page.
For anything significant, we'll flag it on the site, and we'll email you if you have an account with us or you're subscribed to our emails. If you keep using the site after a change, that's you accepting the updated terms.
Your order is always governed by the terms in place on the day you placed it.
How to reach us
Email support@thecheernote.com. That's our only support channel — there's no phone line — and it's the right place for anything, whether it's an order, a problem, or a question about these terms. We're a small team in Karachi and we read everything that comes in.
If you're writing about an order, please include the recipient's name and roughly when you ordered, so we can find it quickly.
You'll also find us on Instagram as cheernote_postcards, though email is the right place for anything to do with an order.