Receipts, and how to stop paying

Where the receipts actually are

Grafter does not hold your invoices. Every payment on this product is taken by Stripe, and Stripe is where the paperwork sits — the receipt for each payment, the history of all of them, and the card the money came off. There is no screen in this app that will print you one.

That is a line we drew rather than a gap we left. Handling card details and issuing tax invoices badly is a worse problem than sending you to somebody who already does both properly. It does mean the receipt you are after is one door away, and the door is not signposted as well as it should be.

1. Find Manage billing. It is in the account menu behind your picture, at the top of the Usage & billing page, and in Settings under Account.
2. Press it. Grafter hands you to Stripe's own billing page, where your invoices are listed and each one can be downloaded.
3. Come back when you are done — the page has a link back to Grafter.

Tip. Nothing in Grafter tells you when your next payment is due or what it will be. The date on your usage page is when the month's credit allowance resets, which is a different clock and can drift away from the billing date.

The activity list is not a receipt

The Usage & billing page carries a list headed Recent activity: the last twenty movements on the account, each with a figure beside it in dollars. Those figures are what the credits were worth at the standard rate. They are not what your card was charged.

The two are furthest apart on a top-up. Packs bought on the larger plans carry extra credits, so the row records the value of everything that arrived rather than the price you paid for it. If you are checking against a bank statement, the invoice on Stripe's page is the number that will match. This list will not, and it is not trying to.

Note. Reading that list line by line is a subject of its own, and it has a page of its own. This one is only about the money.

What Manage billing opens, and what it will not do

The button does not cancel anything, change anything or charge anything. It asks Stripe for a single-use link and sends you there. Everything happens on Stripe's page, in Stripe's words, and nothing has changed here until you finish.

What is offered on that page is set on our Stripe account rather than written into this product, so read the box below as what the page is for rather than as a promise about every button on it.

The billing page

Invoices

Every payment, listed, and each one downloadable

Your card

Swap it, or put a new one on

Your plan

Change it, or cancel the subscription

Credits

Not there. Credits are not money and never appear

Auto top-up

Not there either. It is not a subscription, and its switch is in Grafter

Note. Manage billing does not appear until a payment has cleared, because the billing record it opens is written when the money arrives. If you have paid and there is no button — or pressing it says we cannot find a billing record — that is our side out of step with Stripe. Write to us from the contact page rather than paying again.

Cancelling

Cancelling is done on Stripe's page, and there is no second way to do it here. Settings has a row called Cancel subscription, and it opens the same page Manage billing does. It is worded as a door rather than a switch on purpose: pressing it stops nothing.

That row only appears if you have a subscription to stop. An account that bought a one-off pack of credits and nothing else has no subscription and nothing being taken every month, so there is nothing there for it to show.

1. Open Settings, then Account.
2. Press Cancel subscription at Stripe, and finish the cancellation on the page that opens. It tells you the date the subscription ends.
3. Come back. Nothing in Grafter will look any different yet, and that is expected rather than a failure.

Note. We are never told that you have asked to cancel — only that the subscription has ended, on the day it ends. Until then this app still shows your paid plan and still shows the Cancel subscription row, and neither of those means the cancellation did not take. Stripe's page is the one that knows. That gap is ours, and it is worth knowing about before you go back and cancel a second time.

The day it ends, and what changes

Cancelling normally leaves the plan running to the end of the period you have already paid for, whether that is a month or a year, and the page you cancel on tells you which day that is. Nothing about the account changes in the meantime. On the day the subscription actually ends, the account moves to the free tier, which your plan row will call Starter, and that is the moment everything in the table below happens.

A card that stops working reaches the same place by a different road. Once Stripe has retried the payment and given up, the subscription ends and the account drops in exactly the same way. From inside the app the two are indistinguishable, which is worth knowing if a plan you did not cancel has gone.

Tip. If you are going to stop, publish and download what you want before the last day. Publishing and saving the code somewhere are the two things the free tier does not include. A site that is already live is not affected either way.

Note. Nothing about ending a plan touches files you have already downloaded, and nothing reaches into your hosting account to take a site down. What you have taken out of the product is out of it.

Moving down a plan instead of stopping

Changing plan does not open a second subscription. It moves the one you already have, which is what stops anybody ending up paying for two at once. Stripe works out the difference for the part of the period that is left and invoices it there and then, going down as well as up.

The credits do not follow the money. The new plan's allowance replaces what is left of the old one rather than being added to it, and that is true in both directions — move down mid-month and the smaller allowance applies immediately, however much of the month is still to run. Money is worked out pro rata; credits are not, and the button does not say so.

Note. If that immediate invoice cannot be paid — a declined card, or a bank wanting to check it is you — the change is refused outright and you stay on the plan you were on. Nothing is left half applied.

Two things cancelling does not stop

Ending a subscription ends a subscription. There are two other ways money leaves an account here, and neither of them is one.

Automatic top-ups keep going

Automatic top-up is not a subscription. It is a standing permission to charge the card we hold when your balance falls low, and Stripe's page has no switch for it because there is nothing there to switch. Cancelling your plan leaves it armed, and it works on the free tier exactly as it worked on a paid one.

This catches people because the first top-up anybody buys is what turns it on. If you are stopping in order to stop paying, turn it off as well, and turn it off in Grafter rather than on Stripe's page.

Two things make it harder to find than it should be, and both are ours to answer for. It has two names: Settings under Account calls it Auto top-up and tells you whether it is on, and the switch that changes it is labelled Auto-reload. And the switch is not on the Usage & billing page with the rest of the money — it sits in the credit packs dialog, below the packs.

1. Check Settings, then Account. The Auto top-up row says On or Off, and if it says Off there is nothing to do.
2. Open the credit packs dialog. In the editor it is Buy credits in the menu. From the Usage & billing page, open the plans and then press Buy credits at the top of the panel.
3. Scroll past the packs to Auto-reload and turn the switch off.

Note. Switching it off keeps the card saved, which is what makes a manual top-up one press instead of a trip through a checkout. It does not arm itself again the next time you buy a pack.

Money already owed stays owed

If pay as you go has been lending against your account and has paused it, that debt is a separate invoice and cancelling does nothing to it. Paying that invoice is the one thing that lifts the pause. Buying credits does not, and moving back onto a paid plan does not either.

The pay-as-you-go panel does not disappear when the plan does. On the Usage & billing page it stays, above Recent activity, and it keeps the two things that matter: the amount owed and the button that pays the invoice. What goes is the switch and the terms beside it, because borrowing again needs a paid plan and a card behind it. If the invoice link is not showing yet, the invoice is on its way to the address the account is on.

There is no refund button

There is nowhere in this product to ask for your money back. No screen, no form, nothing behind a menu. Saying that plainly is more use than a page that implies otherwise and leaves you hunting.

What happens without anybody asking is short. A turn that fails returns its credits before the error reaches your screen. A plan change is charged pro rata by Stripe on the day it happens. That is the whole automatic list.

Everything past that is a person's decision. Write to us from the contact page, from the address the account is on, and say what you paid for and what went wrong. It lands with us directly rather than in a queue.

Tip. If you bought as a consumer rather than for a business, the law gives you fourteen days to change your mind — and spending any part of what you bought is what gives that right up. The terms page sets out how that works and what you were asked to agree to at the checkout.

Note. A refund on a credit purchase takes the credits back with it, because they are what the money bought. A refund of only part of a payment is not handled automatically at all and has to be worked out by hand, so if one has been agreed and your balance has not moved, that is expected rather than lost.

Common questions

Where do I download an invoice?

On Stripe's billing page, reached from Manage billing in the account menu, at the top of the Usage & billing page, or in Settings under Account. Grafter keeps no copy of its own.

I cancelled, and Grafter still shows my paid plan. Did it work?

Almost certainly. We are only told when the subscription actually ends, not when you ask, so nothing here changes until that day. The page you cancelled on is the one that shows the date and the state.

Will my website go offline if I stop paying?

No. A published site is deployed into your own hosting account and stays exactly where it is. What the free tier stops is publishing again and saving the code somewhere new.

Do I lose the credits I bought?

No. Credits bought as a top-up were bought outright and do not expire, so they survive a cancellation. What goes is whatever is left of that month's plan allowance.

There is no Manage billing button on my account.

It appears once a payment has cleared, because that is when the billing record it opens gets written. If you are being charged and it is not there, tell us from the contact page and do not pay again.