My plan did not update after paying

Summary#

Your plan is not stored at checkout. It is written afterwards, from your live subscription, by two independent mechanisms: an immediate notification from Stripe, and a reconcile that runs every fifteen minutes and compares your live subscriptions against your stored plan. Between them, a successful payment almost always becomes an active plan within fifteen minutes. If it does not, the cause is nearly always that the payment and the sign-in belong to two different email addresses.

Symptoms#

• Checkout completed, you returned to the dashboard, and the credit pill still shows the old plan.
• The sidebar chip still reads the previous plan, for example FREE PLAN.
• Account → Account Settings still shows the old plan name, price and allowance.
• A tool still refuses with This feature requires the <Tier> plan. Your account is on <Plan>. Upgrade to unlock it.
• Pressing Manage Billing returns You are not on a paid subscription yet, so there is no billing to manage.
• You received a Stripe receipt but the app behaves as though you did not pay.

Diagnosis#

What is supposed to happen#

1. You complete Stripe Checkout and are returned to the dashboard.
2. Stripe notifies us that the checkout completed, and we read the subscription it created to decide your tier. That write is immediate.
3. Independently, a reconcile job runs every fifteen minutes. It lists every live subscription in Stripe, works out the tier each customer is entitled to, and corrects any stored plan that disagrees. An hourly backup runs the same job.
4. The app reads your plan whenever it asks for your usage: on dashboard load, when your session is restored, and after every successful premium run.

Step 4 is the part people miss. There is no confirmation screen after checkout and no live push into an open tab. A dashboard tab that was already open before you paid will keep showing the old plan until something makes it re-read.

The five real causes, in the order to check them#

Cause 3 is the one that never fixes itself#

Your plan is resolved from the email address you are signed in with. Stripe records the subscription against the email you gave at checkout. If you signed in as you@company.com but paid as finance@company.com, both records are correct and they will never meet. The reconcile compares Stripe to our records by email, so it keeps confirming that finance@company.com is on Pro and you@company.com is on Free.

Symptoms that point at this: a valid Stripe receipt, and Manage Billing telling you there is nothing to manage.

There is no self-serve fix, because an account's email address cannot be changed. Contact us with both addresses and we will move the plan. See Contacting support.

Cause 4: which subscription states grant access#

A subscription grants paid access while it is active, trialing, or past due. Past due is included on purpose: the card has failed and Stripe is still retrying, and cutting off a paying customer mid-retry is worse than a few extra days of access. Any terminal state, such as cancelled or unpaid, drops the account back to Free.

If Stripe shows the subscription as incomplete, the payment did not actually finish, whatever the checkout page appeared to say. See Subscription states and Failed payments.

Cause 5: a manually set plan#

If our team has set your plan by hand, for example a comp or a trial extension, that setting is protected. The reconcile and ordinary subscription events will not overwrite it, so a later Stripe change may appear to be ignored. Completing a fresh checkout does overwrite it. If you believe your plan is pinned when it should not be, ask us to clear it.

Cancellation does not take effect immediately#

Cancelling through the billing portal cancels at the end of the current period. You keep the plan until then, and the app does not display a "cancels at period end" notice. If you cancelled and are surprised to still have access, that is why. See Cancelling your subscription.

Checkout never opened at all#

If pressing an upgrade button did nothing, or you saw the error and were sent to the pricing page, no payment was taken. A plan chosen before signing in is held through sign-in and resumed once you land in the app, so if you were interrupted you may find checkout opening a moment after you next sign in. See Subscribing and checkout.

Resolution#

Work down the list. Most cases are solved by step 1 or step 3.

1. Reload the dashboard. Not the browser Back button. This is the single most common fix, because an already-open tab does not re-read your plan.
2. Check the credit pill and the sidebar chip. They both come from the same source, so if one is right and the other is not, reload again.
3. Wait fifteen minutes, then reload. That is the reconcile interval. If the webhook was missed, the reconcile is the safety net.
4. Press Manage Billing on Account → Account Settings.
• If the Stripe portal opens, the subscription is attached to your signed-in address, and this is a timing problem. Go back to step 3.
• If you get You are not on a paid subscription yet, so there is no billing to manage. then no Stripe customer exists for your signed-in address. That is cause 3.
5. Check your Stripe receipt for the email it was sent to. If it is not the address you sign in with, you have found the cause. Contact us with both addresses.
6. Check the subscription state in the Stripe portal if it opened. An incomplete subscription means the payment did not complete; retry checkout.
7. Contact support with your sign-in email, the email on the receipt, the Stripe receipt or invoice number, the plan you bought, and the time of purchase. That set of five facts is enough for us to resolve every case in this article. See Contacting support.

Prevention#

• Pay with the address you sign in with. Stripe Checkout pre-fills the email from your account when you start the upgrade from inside the app, so starting the upgrade from Account → Account Settings is the safest route.
• Upgrade from inside the app rather than from a forwarded payment link.
• Reload once after paying rather than assuming the tab will update.
• Keep one billing owner per workspace. One subscription covers the workspace and everyone in it, so a teammate paying separately creates exactly the split described in cause 3. See Team and workspace billing.
• Do not re-run checkout when in doubt. Ask first; a duplicate subscription is harder to unwind than a delayed one.