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Payment, invoices, and failed payments

This page covers the mechanics of paying Sencai - checkout, payment methods, invoices, and what happens if a payment doesn’t go through. For what each plan includes, see Organization plans or Personal plans.

Checkout

Section titled “Checkout”

Choosing an organization plan (/gravity/checkout/upgrade) or your own personal plan (/gravity/profile/checkout/upgrade) takes you to a Stripe-hosted Checkout page to enter payment details. Stripe redirects you back to a success or cancel page in the app afterward:

  • Success - a confirmation screen; activation can take a few seconds to finish in the background, so give it a moment before checking your plan.
  • Cancel - reached if you back out of Stripe’s page. No payment is taken and nothing about your plan changes; you can retry whenever you’re ready.

Organization and personal checkout are entirely separate flows - each only ever changes the plan it was started from.

Payment methods and invoices

Section titled “Payment methods and invoices”

Once you have an active plan, payment methods, upcoming billing dates, and invoices are managed through a Stripe-hosted billing portal, reached from the Invoices & payment section of Settings → Billing (/gravity/organisation/detail?tab=billing&section=invoices) via the billing-portal button. The same section lists your invoices with PDF download, your billing e-mail and your next billing date. You’ll land in the Billing area automatically after checkout completes, or from an upgrade prompt if you hit a plan limit; the old /gravity/settings/billing address redirects there.

Your organization’s VAT ID and company registration number, if your account has them set, are shown on the organization profile.

If a payment fails

Section titled “If a payment fails”

If a card is declined or a renewal payment fails, your organization doesn’t lose access immediately - it moves through a staged process, with a clear warning and a chance to fix it at every step before anything is restricted:

Day State What you see What’s blocked
0 Payment fails Email notification; Payment failed banner in the app Nothing - full access continues
7 Grace period Same Payment failed banner; another email Nothing yet - this is a pre-suspension warning window
14 Suspended Subscription suspended banner; another email Creating or changing cloud instances and changing organization settings. Running servers on Sencai accounts are also powered off, to limit further use while the payment issue is unresolved - never deleted at this stage. Everything else - dashboards, reports, and the billing pages themselves - stays reachable
21 Terminated Organization archived Resources on Sencai accounts are torn down: non-terminal cloud instances are permanently deleted at the provider, not stopped. The data on them is lost. This cannot be undone. Resources in your own cloud provider accounts are never deleted - see below

A few things worth knowing about this:

  • Resolving payment at any point before day 21 restores the organization to normal immediately - the moment your card is charged successfully, the organization drops out of the process entirely, whatever step it was at, and any server Sencai itself powered off at day 14 is switched back on.
  • The day-14 read-only state is deliberately narrow. You can still see everything (instances, usage, reports), and - critically - the billing and checkout pages are never blocked, so you’re never in a position where you can see the problem but can’t fix it.
  • Powering off doesn’t always stop the provider’s own charge. Some providers bill a server for as long as it exists, whether it’s on or off - the same providers named at your spend cap (Hetzner, OVHcloud, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, and UpCloud). For those, day 14 limits what the server can do but not what it costs; only deleting it - which happens automatically at day 21, or sooner if you remove it yourself - stops that charge. On OVHcloud specifically, Sencai can’t power a server off automatically at all, so it keeps running unchanged until day 21 or your own action. Scaleway servers are powered off, and Scaleway stops charging for their compute while they are off; their volumes (and any reserved IP) keep billing until the server is deleted.
  • Update your payment method from the Invoices & payment section’s Stripe portal (see above) at any point during this process to resolve it.

Your own cloud accounts are never touched

Section titled “Your own cloud accounts are never touched”

The teardown above applies only to resources running on Sencai accounts - the ones where we hold the account with the provider and pass their charges through to you (see Sencai accounts for how those are set up, priced, and what happens at your spend cap). If you brought your own cloud accounts, the contractual relationship with that provider is yours, the resources are yours, and we never delete them, at any stage of this process or any other. Non-payment can cost you access to Sencai; it cannot cost you infrastructure we do not own. Deleting an organization works the same way: its resources on Sencai accounts are destroyed, and your own accounts are only disconnected - see Deleting an organization.

What we keep afterwards, and for how long

Section titled “What we keep afterwards, and for how long”

After a teardown we keep a description of what was deleted - resource names, sizes, regions and how they were wired together - so the same shape can be rebuilt quickly if you come back. We keep it for at most six months, and then delete it irreversibly along with everything else.

Two things that description is not:

  • It is not a backup. It records that a server existed and how it was configured, never what was stored on it. Rebuilding from it gives you an empty copy of your infrastructure.
  • It is not a way to undo the deletion. The resources are gone at the provider from day 21; this only shortens the work of standing new ones up.

While an organization is in this process, the Infrastructure Lifecycle tab of the organization page in the app shows where you stand, which of your resources are affected by name, and lets you download the Terraform export - none of which can be answered by a documentation page, because all of it is specific to your organization.

Canceling your subscription

Section titled “Canceling your subscription”

There is no separate cancel button and no choice between named tiers. To stop paying, an Owner or Admin uses Return to Free in Settings → Billing → Plan & seats. The page shows the date the return takes effect and offers Cancel scheduled return until then. Returning to Free stops future billing - it does not delete your organization or its data - and the free configuration’s limits apply from then on (see Organization plans).

What’s next

Section titled “What’s next”