My payment failed — what now?

If a renewal charge fails — most often because a card has expired, been replaced, or was declined by the bank — your subscription doesn't immediately end. It moves into a "past due" state, you get a banner in the app, and you have a window to fix it before anything else changes.

This article covers what that window looks like and how to clear it.

Past due is the state your account sits in between "Stripe tried to charge your card and it didn't work" and "we've given up and cancelled the subscription." It's not a cancellation. It's a heads-up.

You'll know you're in it because:

The banner is meant to be obvious without being alarming — the goal is to make sure you see it and act on it, not to scare you.

For the first 7 days after the payment failure, the app remains fully usable. You can record transactions, edit holdings, generate reports, do anything you'd normally do on your plan. The only difference is the past-due banner sitting at the top of the page, asking you to update your payment method.

This 7-day window is your soft-access period. The intent is straightforward: most failed payments are caused by something small (a card that quietly expired, a bank flagging the charge as unusual, a temporary issue at the processor), and the easiest path to a fix is to give you uninterrupted access while you sort it out.

If you update your card during this window, the next retry by Stripe usually succeeds, and everything goes back to normal — banner clears, account moves back to active, no further action needed.

If 7 days pass and the payment still hasn't gone through, the soft window ends. The app moves to a locked state — you can still sign in but the editing tools are switched off and the banner changes to reflect that access is paused pending a payment update.

This is a temporary state, not a cancellation. The moment a successful charge goes through, the lock lifts and the app is fully usable again.

The fix is the same regardless of whether you're inside the 7-day window or past it.

Once the new card is in place, Stripe's next retry will use it. If you'd rather not wait for the next scheduled retry, you can often trigger an immediate retry by clicking the "Pay now" button on the failed invoice in the billing portal — that charges the new card right away.

When the charge succeeds:

That's the whole loop.

For the longer walkthrough on the card-update flow itself, see Updating your payment method.

While your account is past due, Stripe is automatically retrying the failed payment on its own schedule. The typical shape is three or four retries spread across two to four weeks.

You don't need to coordinate the retries — they happen on their own. If the underlying problem is genuinely temporary (a one-off decline that resolves itself), a retry might succeed without you doing anything at all.

More often, though, you'll need to update the card for the retries to actually go through.

Stripe also sends its own payment-failure emails directly to your account address, separate from any in-app banner. If you don't see them, check your spam folder — bank and payment-related emails sometimes get filtered.

If you let the situation sit and never update the card, Stripe will eventually exhaust its retry schedule. At that point, your subscription is cancelled automatically.

A cancellation triggered this way puts your account into the same state as any other cancellation: read-only mode, frozen spot prices, and the standard data retention window. See What happens to your data after you cancel, for what that looks like.

Reactivating from this state is the same process as reactivating from any other cancellation — sign in, resubscribe from the Subscription tab, complete checkout. See Reactivating a cancelled subscription.

But the easier outcome is to act inside the past-due window. Updating a card takes about a minute. Resubscribing from scratch takes longer, even if the result is the same.

A few that account for most cases:

If you've tried updating the card and the retry still fails, the next step is usually a quick call to your bank to ask why — they have visibility into the decline reason that we don't.