Payment failures
What a failed payment does, what it never does, and why a declined card cannot cost you your databases.
A declined payment never deletes data. It moves your subscription along a sequence of states, and suspension is as far as that sequence goes.
This page is what each state means and what to do about it.
Fix a failed payment
- Open Billing.
- Update the payment method under the payment panel.
- Confirm who you are when asked. That confirmation covers this one change.
Storing a new method charges the outstanding invoices straight away rather than waiting for a later attempt.
The payment method is changed by an owner or by a member with the billing role. Administrators can see billing and cannot change the payment method.
The sequence
- A charge is declined. The subscription moves to Payment failed. Your services keep running and your access is unchanged. The billing screen shows the state, and under the invoice it shows what each payment attempt did.
- A second charge is declined. The subscription enters the grace period and a suspension date is stored. A banner appears on every page of the dashboard, and the billing screen names the date. Services keep running.
- A charge is declined on or after that date. Services are suspended.
- A charge succeeds, at any step, and the subscription is active again.
A decline and an error are different things. A decline is your bank saying no. An error is our payment provider not answering, and it never moves a subscription along this sequence. A card that is fine does not cost you your databases because a provider had an outage.
Suspension is not deletion
Suspension stops your databases and nothing else. They stop accepting connections, and the data and the backups are kept. The dashboard, the billing screen and export all stay available.
Export keeps working throughout. A suspended service can still be exported, and so can a service in any billing state except deleted. See exporting. Withholding a customer's data over a bill is not a collections strategy we operate.
A declined charge cannot move an organisation past suspension, and nothing in the payment path deletes data.
Card details never reach Balta
They go to the payment provider's own hosted field. The database has columns for the provider's token, the card brand, the last four digits and the expiry, and none for a card number or a security code.
What we do not do
We do not add late fees. An invoice line is a plan, storage, retention, a fixed IP or a prorated plan change, and there is no other kind.
We do not add countdowns or urgency to the interface, and we do not hide the cancellation path to make paying feel easier. Cancelling is two clicks from billing, and a failed payment does not change that.
What you will see
On the billing screen: the subscription state, and under an unpaid invoice, what each payment attempt did. In the grace period, a banner on every page of the dashboard and the suspension date named on the billing screen.
A suspended service refuses connections. Your own pg_dump cannot reach it, and the dashboard export
still can.
Troubleshooting
Your services stopped and the invoice is paid. A successful payment returns the subscription to active. If the services are still stopped, contact support.
"Payment methods cannot be added yet." No payment provider is connected, so there is nothing to exchange card details with. The billing screen says so before you try.
"This card expires soon." Replace it before it does, so a renewal is not declined for a reason you could have avoided.
billing.standing_denied on an unrelated action. The organisation's billing state does not
currently allow that operation. Restores are among the operations paused while an account is unpaid.
You need your data while suspended. Open Import and export and request an export. It works in every state in which your data still exists.