Suspension for non-payment is almost always an accident: an email in a spam folder, a card that expired, a renewal that fell on a week somebody was away. All four of the fixes take a few minutes once.
The four
- Use an email address you actually read
Invoices and warnings go to the address on the account. If that is an address you set up years ago and never open, the timeline runs without you seeing any of it.
- Check that our messages are not going to spam
Find a previous invoice email and mark it as not spam, or add the sender to your contacts. Doing this now costs nothing; discovering it on the day of suspension costs a day.
- Put the renewal date in your calendar
Not as a reminder to pay, but as a reminder to check the card on file is still valid. Cards expire quietly and the failure looks like a payment problem rather than a date problem.
- Keep a downloaded backup
The one thing that makes a worst case survivable. If the timeline ever does run out, a copy on your own machine means you lost a service rather than a world.
The timeline, so it holds no surprises
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Before the due date | The invoice is issued and reminders are sent. |
| The due date | An unpaid invoice suspends the service. |
| Seven days after | Everything is permanently deleted. There is no recovery after this. |
During it, the data is still there and settling the invoice brings the service back. After it, the container, its databases and its backups are gone and no copy is retained. This is the one date on this page where being a day late changes the outcome permanently.
A conversation started early is a different conversation from one started on day six. It also costs nothing to have, and the billing portal is where it belongs.