Unpaid renewal: free limits, stopped databases, getting back
What Voroa does when a monthly renewal goes unpaid: how many attempts, how long you have, what changes for apps and databases, and when data is lost for good.
Nothing here happens quickly or quietly. Every step below is announced by email before it takes effect, and every step has a way back until the last one.
The sequence
- The automatic payment is attempted. If it does not go through, we email you the same day and try again after a delay. Each attempt waits longer than the last.
- A payment link is sent for the same bill, for the same amount. Paying it settles the month exactly as an automatic payment would, and you get the same GST invoice.
- After the attempts are used up, your paid services move to free limits. You get an email when this happens.
- Nothing further happens to an app or a worker. For a managed database, see the section below.
If auto-pay is already off before the renewal date, there is no automatic payment to attempt, so you hear from us earlier: an email soon after auto-pay stops, and a reminder a few days before the renewal date. Both name the date until which your paid services keep running. Turn auto-pay back on from your Billing page before that date and none of the steps above happen.
What “free limits” means depends on the service
This is the part most worth reading, because the three are genuinely different.
- Apps and workers keep running. They are given less memory and less processing power, so they are slower. Your code, your environment variables, your domains and your data are untouched.
- A managed database is stopped, not slowed. It stops accepting connections, so anything that connects to it will fail. The data is still there.
- Your workspace plan moves to the free plan, which changes the limits that apply to new work.
A stopped database is not kept forever
If a stopped database is not restarted, it is eventually removed from the platform. That is the one step on this page that cannot be undone, so it is worth being precise about it.
- We take a final backup before removing it.
- We email you before the removal date, and again close to it. Each email states the date and the last day on which paying restores the database.
- Once removal begins, the database cannot be restarted, and the data is no longer available to you.
- The waiting period is at least seven days from the day the database is stopped, and is normally considerably longer. The exact date is always in the emails we send you - we do not rely on you knowing a default.
Getting back
- A stopped database: open it in your dashboard and reactivate it. You are charged a prorated amount for the current billing period and a GST invoice is issued after payment. This works at any time before the removal date.
- An app or worker at free limits: pay the outstanding bill from your Billing page.
- If your payment method itself has stopped working - the auto-pay permission ended, or the card expired - paying a single bill is not enough. Set up auto-pay again from the Billing page, or the same thing will happen next month. When your Billing page shows a Pay and turn on auto-pay button, use it: one approval pays the overdue month and sets auto-pay up again, so you do not need to do both.
Things we will not do
- We will not remove an app, a worker, its code, its settings or its domains for non-payment.
- We will not remove a database without emailing you first.
- We will not take more than the amount we first told you was due for that month. If your bill grows because you bought something while an earlier month was unpaid, we re-quote before taking anything.