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.

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 Update Card 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.