This is a life-safety product, so a billing problem is treated as a billing problem and nothing more. If a payment fails, nothing about your monitoring changes: readings keep arriving, alerts keep going out, escalation keeps escalating, acknowledgements keep being recorded, and your history is not touched.
| What happens | When |
|---|---|
| A payment fails. We start a 14-day window and email you. Everything continues exactly as before — you keep your full plan, including its retention. | Straight away |
| Retries during the window. Fixing the card at any point ends this quietly, and the window is not extended by further retries — it is measured from the first failure. | Within 14 days |
| The window expires. Setup changes pause — see below for exactly which. Monitoring, alerting, acknowledgement and your history all keep working, and your retention stays at the tier you were paying for. | After 14 days |
There is no state in which an unpaid invoice stops us telling somebody that a kitchen is dangerous. A paused account still alerts, still escalates, and still records who acknowledged what.
The line, once the window has expired, is between growing your setup and running it. You can still do everything that keeps people safe or that makes your account smaller — and it is only adding and rearranging that waits for payment.
| Still works | Waits for payment |
|---|---|
| Acknowledging alerts, and escalation continuing when nobody does | Adding stores, regions, markets, groups or units |
| Muting a unit for maintenance, and un-muting it | Provisioning a cellular unit, or mapping a new fleet |
| Arranging temporary coverage for someone on holiday | Inviting people, and importing a spreadsheet |
| Confirming your store list, or flagging one that's wrong | Renaming a store or moving it between regions |
| Fixing your own phone number or email | Uploading a company logo |
| Sending a test alert, and revoking a device key | Re-opening a store you closed |
| Closing a store, deleting a unit, turning things off |
Temporary coverage is deliberately on the left-hand side. Refusing to let you arrange cover for a manager on holiday would send the next heat alert to somebody who isn't there — which is the exact failure this product exists to prevent, and not something a billing problem should be able to cause.
Only an explicit cancellation moves an account back to the free plan — which matters because that is what eventually shortens how long history is kept. It never happens as a side effect of a failed payment.
Read next: Billing and changing plan →Read next: How long history is kept →