I refund anyone who asks and my dispute rate is still climbing, what does a policy that actually prevents disputes look like?

The second group are people who did know it was you and went to the bank anyway. That is a communication failure, and it is fixable.

The reasons people skip the seller, roughly in order:

They could not find how to contact you, or they did and got no reply for two days. A dispute is what people do when they think emailing will not work.

They do not believe the refund will happen. Enough companies make it hard that the bank feels like the reliable route. Your policy has to be visible before they need it, not discoverable in a support email.

They forgot they subscribed. A charge months later on something they stopped using looks like a mistake.

So, concretely:

Put the policy where people look, the checkout page, the receipt, and the footer. Not only in a terms page.

Make the contact route obvious in the receipt. The receipt is the document people find when they are looking at the charge.

Warn before recurring charges. A short email a few days before a renewal is the single most effective anti-dispute measure for subscriptions, and people rarely resent it.

Reply fast. An acknowledgement within an hour, even if the refund takes a day, prevents nearly all of the escalations in this group.

Check what your charge looks like on a bank statement before you change anything else. This is the highest-return thing in this thread and it is usually a one-field fix.

A large share of disputes filed as fraudulent are not fraud and are not even unhappy customers. They are somebody scanning a statement, seeing a name they do not recognise, and clicking the button their bank makes very easy. Your customer knows your product name; if the statement shows a company name, an old trading name, or an abbreviation, they have no way to connect the two.

What to do:

Set the statement descriptor to the name people actually bought from. The one on your website and in your emails, as closely as your processor allows.

Say it explicitly at checkout and in the receipt. One line telling them what will appear on their statement removes the entire category.

Send a receipt immediately, with the product name, the amount, and how to contact you. People dispute when they cannot find another route.

This also explains why generosity has not helped: the people filing are not weighing your refund policy at all. They never got as far as considering it, because they did not know it was you. A policy only works on people who know who you are.

One caution about your open policy, since you are wondering whether generosity is backfiring: it is not causing the disputes, but it does interact badly with one specific case.

A no-questions refund on a digital product that has already been downloaded is worth thinking about, not because most people abuse it, but because the small number who do will keep coming back and there is nothing on your side stopping them. That is a different problem from disputes, and it wants a different remedy - usually a time window rather than a refusal, which is much easier to state and much easier to enforce.

What I would keep from your current approach: fast, generous, and no argument. That is genuinely correct and it is worth more than the money it costs, because the alternative is disputes, which cost more.

What I would add:

• A stated window rather than an unbounded one
• The policy visible before purchase, so it does work for you at the point where people are deciding whether to trust you
• A record of who you have refunded, so a repeat pattern is visible

And track the reason codes on the disputes you do get. If most say fraudulent rather than product not as described, the descriptor answer above is your problem and the policy is not, which changes what you should spend the next week on.