Billing and payments

Payments are processed by Stripe. Card details never touch our servers, and
Stripe is the record: the invoices on your billing page are read from it.

Whose subscription it is

A subscription belongs to an organization, not a person. The billing page
operates on the organization you administer: your personal one for most
people, or a department or team you administer, chosen from that
organization’s page. Access is decided by the organization’s subscription,
and a member’s access is the best plan across every organization they belong
to.

Buying

• Plus is one subscription, monthly or annual, for the organization.
• Team and Institution are per seat: choose how many seats at checkout,
  no fewer than the plan’s minimum, and the subscription carries that
  number. See Seats for changing it later.

A per-seat plan without a price yet is listed on the billing page as “price
on request”: talk to us, and we set it up.

Checkout happens on Stripe’s page. Your subscription shows as active the
moment you land back, and the webhook from Stripe confirms it independently:
if you close the tab mid-payment, nothing is lost.

Managing

Manage billing opens the Stripe portal: update the card, switch between
monthly and annual, cancel, and download every invoice. It appears once the
organization has paid through Stripe: before that there is nothing in the
portal to manage. Seats on a per-seat plan are changed from your
organization page or the billing page.

Paying by invoice and purchase order

An institution whose procurement office cannot pay by card is billed by
invoice against net terms instead. It works like this:

1. On your organization page, under Invoicing, enter the billing contact
   (where invoices and reminders go), your purchase order number, your tax
   id (VAT, GST, EIN) with its type, and the terms you need: net 30 or net
   1. Then tell us which plan and how many seats.
2. Staff start the subscription from the admin console. Stripe emails the
   invoice to your billing contact with the PO number printed on it and the
   tax id you entered; the organization has its plan from that moment, not
   from the day the invoice is paid.
3. Pay the invoice by bank transfer or card from the link in the email. When
   Stripe reports it paid, the invoice shows as paid on your billing page.

Every invoice is mirrored on our side the moment Stripe reports it, so your
billing page lists them even when Stripe is unreachable.

Nothing closes automatically for an organization billed by invoice. A
card renewal that fails starts the grace period below; an invoice that is
late does not. Seven and twenty-one days past the due date your billing
contact and administrators get a reminder, each once. If an invoice stays
unpaid past that, a member of staff decides what happens, and talks to you
first.

Tax

Prices are shown before tax. At checkout Stripe Tax works out the tax due
from the address you enter, and you can enter a VAT or GST id there so it
appears on the invoice and, where the rules allow, reverse-charges the tax.
Invoiced subscriptions have tax calculated the same way, from the address
and tax id on the organization. Which jurisdictions we collect for is set in
Stripe by the owner; in one where we hold no registration, no tax is added.

Automatic tax is sent only while Stripe Tax is active on our Stripe account.
The platform asks Stripe once an hour whether it is; when it is not, or
Stripe cannot be asked, checkout still goes through, still collects your tax
id and address, and simply adds no tax, rather than failing. Once Tax is
switched on, every checkout from the next hour carries it.

When a payment fails

A renewal that does not go through does not cut anyone off. It starts a
fourteen-day grace period:

• Day 0. Stripe reports the failure; the organization’s administrators
  get an email naming the amount, the invoice and the date the grace period
  ends, and every page they open carries a banner with the same two links:
  update the card, or pay the invoice directly. Members who are not
  administrators see nothing: there is nothing they can do about it.
• Days 3 and 7. Reminders, with the date. Nothing has changed.
• Day 14. If the payment is still outstanding, data downloads and the
  API close for the organization. Research, notes, the explorer and the
  prices keep working, and nothing is deleted: the pause is on the paid data
  surfaces only. A final email and the banner say so.
• Payment lands. The moment Stripe reports it, the grace period ends,
  the banner goes and the paid features are back.

Each notice goes out once for a given failure, however many times Stripe
retries the charge or redelivers the event. Stripe’s own retry schedule and
its eventual cancellation of an unpaid subscription are unchanged; the grace
period runs alongside them. A staff override on the organization keeps the
data surfaces open through an expired grace, which is what an override is
for while procurement sorts an invoice out.

The emails

Account and billing mail has no unsubscribe link: there is no version of
“your payment failed” a person should be able to switch off.

Related

• Plans and entitlements
• Seats and buying more of them