What happens if a payment fails

The short answer

Short answer: nothing dramatic, and nobody loses access. A failed card is not a lapsed plan.

A failed payment is a dunning state, not a lock

When a payment fails, Stripe retries it over the following days and emails the address on the account. Your firm keeps working throughout: everybody can sign in, engagements run, open networking stays on. We deliberately don't treat a failed payment as a reason to switch anything off — an expired card shouldn't take a paying customer's account away.

Fix it in the billing portal from Settings › Subscription: update the card, and the next retry goes through.

There is no suspension state

FirmLinks used to have one, and it doesn't any more. There's no grace-period countdown, no suspended account, no read-only mode. Two things replaced it:

• A firm that stops paying moves to Free Membership, which is a full account: your firm, your connections, your groups and your running engagements all stay. You lose the three Pro features (creating engagements, creating groups, open networking).
• A firm that cancels is Cancelled — and that one is immediate, with no read-only period. See Upgrade, downgrade or cancel your subscription.

So if you're looking for the screen that says "your access ends in N days", it isn't there because that state no longer exists.

If your membership was paid by another firm and that ends

You land on a live plan immediately — you're never left suspended while somebody works out who pays. See Alliance-paid plans: what's different.

The one state that does refuse you

Cancelled. A cancelled firm is refused everywhere, on every screen, with the reason given. Getting back in means somebody who holds the admin role at that firm taking a plan again, or asking support.

If you think you've been charged wrongly

The billing portal on Settings › Subscription has every invoice and receipt — it's Stripe's own, so it's authoritative. Check the active user count on the invoice first: the tier follows the number of users whose status is active or invited, and deactivating people who've left is the usual reason a bill looks higher than expected. Then contact support with the invoice.