If a subscription payment fails
What StackTrackr does when a subscription payment is declined: a warning email, an in-app banner, and how to fix it before the plan is cancelled.
Cards expire and payments occasionally get declined. When that happens to your StackTrackr subscription, the payment processor (Stripe) does not give up immediately - it retries the charge over the following days. StackTrackr uses that window to make sure you know, so a failed payment never quietly turns into a lost plan.
The moment a payment is declined, we email your workspace billing address (or, if none is set, the first admin) to say the charge could not be taken. The email carries a direct link to update your payment details or pay the outstanding invoice. It is sent once per invoice, so a run of automatic retries will not flood your inbox.
Inside the app, everyone in the workspace sees a banner at the top of every page while the payment problem is unresolved. Admins get an Update payment button on it that leads straight to Plan and billing; members are told to ask an admin, since only admins can manage billing. The Plan and billing page also swaps its usual green status badge for a Payment issue one, so the state is never dressed up as healthy.
Crucially, your access does not change during this period. You keep your full plan and every feature while the retries run, so a blip with your card never interrupts your work. This is deliberate: the goal is to prompt a quick fix, not to punish a temporary payment hiccup.
To resolve it, an admin opens Plan and billing and uses Manage billing (or the link in the email) to update the card. Once a retry succeeds, the banner and the badge clear automatically. If the payment is never updated and Stripe exhausts its retries, the subscription is cancelled and the account returns to the free Starter plan - at which point the usual allowance rules apply again.