Cancelling and reactivating subscriptions

Cancel-at-period-end semantics, the reactivation window, and what happens to entitlements in past_due / unpaid states.

Cancelling does not cut access immediately

The most important thing to understand about cancellation is that it is scheduled, not immediate. When you click Cancel Subscription, the subscription is marked cancel_at_period_end = true in Stripe and everything keeps working until the end of the current billing period. Your entitlements stay active. Your tools keep opening. Your invoices already paid are not refunded.

The only user-visible change is a banner on the billing tab telling you when access will end, plus a Reactivate button replacing the Cancel button.

Why this design: cancelling is almost always a signal of intent, not an emergency. “I want to stop paying next month” is the overwhelming case; “I want my access cut off right this second” is vanishingly rare and usually better handled by changing tiers, not cancelling. Deferring the cancellation until the period end gives you (and your colleagues, if this is an org sub) time to wrap up work and make sure nothing is lost.

Cancelling during a trial

If you cancel during the 14-day trial, the subscription is still marked cancel_at_period_end = true, but in trial mode the “period end” is the trial end date. So you keep full access for however many trial days remain and you are never charged. This is the cleanest way to decide “no, not for me” after trying a tool — you get the full trial, no payment ever lands.

Reactivating

The reactivation window is any time before the scheduled cancel date. While the subscription is still in its current period (even if marked for cancellation), clicking Reactivate unsets the cancel_at_period_end flag and the subscription continues normally into its next period with no interruption, no new Checkout, no card re-entry.

After the cancel date passes, reactivation is no longer available and you must start a new subscription via the normal flow in Subscriptions and trials. Importantly, that new subscription will not get a trial — Stripe remembers the customer already had one.

What past_due and unpaid mean

These are not cancellation states — they are payment failure states — but they look similar to users so we cover them here.

past_due means Stripe tried to charge the card on a scheduled renewal and the charge failed. unpaid means Stripe has exhausted its automatic retries and marked the invoice as unpayable. In either state, our backend revokes entitlements immediately. There is no grace period.

Contrast this with user-initiated cancellation, which keeps entitlements alive until the period end. The asymmetry is deliberate: a user who cancelled has told us they wanted to leave on a specific date; a user whose payment failed has not, and the safe default is to stop provisioning paid features until payment is restored.

What a refund means for access

If a payment is fully refunded — by us, or by Stripe on your behalf — your access to paid features for that period ends, because the period is no longer paid for. This applies to the payment covering the period you are currently in; refunding an older payment does not affect access you have since paid for again. The subscription itself is not cancelled, so the next successful payment restores access automatically with nothing to do on your side.

A partial refund does not change access. A partial refund is a credit against a period you have still paid for, so your tools keep working.

What a chargeback means for access

A chargeback — a payment your bank reverses after you dispute it — reaches the same place as a refund, but only once it is decided.

Opening a dispute changes nothing. While the dispute is open the payment has not been reversed, and cutting off access to someone who goes on to win the dispute would be the wrong way round. Your tools keep working exactly as before.

If the dispute is resolved against us, the payment covering the current period has been reversed, so access to paid features for that period ends — the same rule as a full refund, for the same reason. As with a refund, the subscription itself is not cancelled: the next successful payment restores access automatically.

The test is whether the chargeback reverses everything you had still paid for that period — the original charge, less anything already refunded to you. A chargeback for part of that balance leaves the period partly paid, so your tools keep working. This matters in one sequence that surprises people: if you were given a partial refund and then charged back the remainder, neither step reverses the whole charge on its own, but together they return every cent — so access for that period ends at the second step. The partial refund on its own would not have stopped it.

If the dispute is resolved in your favour after access has stopped, access comes back. We lift the suspension as soon as the outcome arrives; there is nothing to do on your side and nothing to re-purchase. The one exception is a charge we had already refunded in full before the dispute closed — in that case the money is already back with you and the refund rule above is what applies.

Recovering from past_due

1. Go to the billing tab where the failed subscription lives (Account Settings for personal, Organization Settings for an org).
2. Update the payment method via the Manage Payment Methods dialog. See Payment methods and invoices for details.
3. Stripe automatically retries the latest invoice against the new card. Usually this happens within a minute.
4. Once the invoice is paid, the subscription returns to active and the entitlement reconciliation webhook re-provisions access. Users of the subscription do not need to log in again — their next API call picks up the restored entitlements.

If Stripe doesn’t retry automatically for some reason, you can force a retry from the invoice in the Stripe dashboard, but this is rare enough that we don’t expose a “retry now” button in our UI.

Downgrading without cancelling

If you want to reduce your subscription — drop the API tier but keep the Web tier, or remove a tool entirely — don’t cancel. Instead, go to the per-tool tier toggles on the billing tab and untoggle the tier(s) you want to drop, then Save Changes. This opens the preview modal showing the proration credit for the removed tier, and on confirmation the reduced subscription takes effect immediately. You keep paying for the remaining tiers.

Cancellation is only the right move when you want to stop paying for everything on that subscription.

What happens to other orgs’ grants when I cancel

Nothing. Entitlements granted to you by other orgs are independent of your personal subscription — cancelling your personal ACS does not affect the ACS your employer’s org grants you, because those come from a different Stripe customer with its own subscription. You will see the “From [Other Org]” read-only section on Account Settings stay intact while your personal section disappears at the period end.

The converse is also true: if your employer cancels their org subscription, your personal subscription keeps working. The union-of-entitlements rule means your actual tool access is determined by whichever subscriptions are still alive at any given moment.