Upgrading, downgrading, and publish limits

Who can change the plan

Only owners and admins can upgrade, downgrade, or manage the subscription. Editors can open the Billing page to see the plan and usage; viewers don't have a Billing tab at all.

Upgrading

1. Go to Settings → Billing.
2. Click Upgrade (or Choose plan, during the trial) on the plan you want.
3. If you're subscribing for the first time (including during or after the trial), you're taken to a Stripe checkout page, where you pay for your first year. If you already have a paid subscription, a confirm screen opens instead.

An upgrade starts a new 12-month term from the day you confirm it. The confirm screen shows the new term's dates, the new plan's price for 12 months, any discount, the credit for the unused part of your current term, and the amount charged today. Nothing is charged until you click Pay … and upgrade. The credit goes against the new invoice and is never paid out in cash. Your new term follows our Terms of Service, including the early termination fee in Section 13A(g).

If the payment goes through, your new plan, its limits and your new renewal date apply at once.

If your card is declined or your bank asks you to confirm the payment, your plan stays as it is. Click Finish payment on Stripe to open a secure Stripe page, where you can confirm with your bank or pay with another card. If you pay with another card there, your renewals are charged to that card from then on. The upgrade waits for payment for up to 23 hours, and the screen shows the exact time. If you don't pay by then, nothing changes and you can start again. Until then, clicking Upgrade again shows the same Finish payment on Stripe button and the time it waits.

Before you upgrade, cancel any scheduled downgrade with Cancel downgrade, and undo a scheduled cancellation with Undo cancellation. If a payment is overdue, update your card under Manage Subscription first. The confirm screen tells you if one of these is in the way.

On a trial: every paid plan shows Choose plan while your trial is active. Buying starts the paid subscription right away — there's no need to wait for the trial to run out. What the trial itself includes is covered in Plans and publish limits.

Downgrading

Downgrades are scheduled, not instant. You've already paid for the current year, so you keep it:

1. In Settings → Billing, click Downgrade on a lower plan. Downgrade is greyed out on a plan that covers fewer passports than you have published: unpublish some first, or keep your current plan.
2. The billing page now shows "Changing to {plan} on {date}", where the date is your renewal date, and the target plan card shows a Scheduled badge.
3. Until that date, nothing changes in PassportCraft: current plan, current limits. Stripe's billing portal already lists the new plan, because that is what your next invoice will be for.
4. To change your mind, click Cancel downgrade in the notice (or Switch downgrade to pick a different target plan). To upgrade instead, cancel the downgrade first, then click Upgrade.

On your renewal date, the new plan and its limits take effect. There's no proration on a downgrade; the new plan starts with your next billing year.

Over-limit passports stay published

If a downgrade leaves you with more published passports than the new plan covers, all of them stay published. PassportCraft never automatically moves a published passport to draft.

What changes is that you reach the at-limit state:

• A banner across the app tells you where you stand: "You're at your published-passport limit on the {plan} plan ({published}/{limit}). Upgrade to publish more."
• You cannot publish additional new passports until you either upgrade to a higher plan or manually unpublish some to get within the new limit.
• No data is lost and no QR codes go dark. Your existing published passports continue to resolve normally for anyone scanning them.

To resolve the overage, unpublish the passports you choose to make room, or upgrade again to clear the banner.

When a trial expires

When the trial ends, your organization moves to the Free plan automatically. A trial and the Free plan both allow 3 published passports, so everything you published stays live, and you can keep publishing up to 3. To publish more, click Choose a plan in the banner.

Cancel vs downgrade

• Downgrade — you stay a paying customer on a smaller plan. Scheduled for your renewal date, as above.
• Cancel — you end the subscription. It runs until the end of the year you've paid for (the billing page shows a Cancels at period end badge, with an Undo cancellation button if you reconsider — clicking it opens your billing portal where you confirm the renewal), then your organization moves to the Free plan. Published passports stay live, but you cannot publish passports until you buy a paid plan again.

How to cancel, and what to export first, is covered in Canceling your subscription and exporting your data.

If a payment fails

A failed renewal puts the subscription in Past due: a red banner appears with an Update payment method button that opens the Stripe billing portal. You keep your plan while Stripe retries. If the payment is still unresolved 7 days after the first failed charge, publishing is paused until it's fixed. An account still on our earlier Terms gets 14 days, and the email about the failed payment says which applies to you. That's cause 5 in Why can't I publish my passport?.