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When a payment fails: the exact timeline

The day-by-day ladder after a failed charge (about 7 days of retries, then read-only, then paused) what each stage means for your team, and the two ways to fix it instantly.

Updated 5 min read
On this page · 5 sections
  1. The ladder, day by day
  2. What read-only actually means
  3. What the emails say
  4. The two ways to fix it
  5. Who to contact

Cards expire, banks get cautious, and finance teams change. A failed charge is normal life, so Current treats it that way. Nothing dramatic happens on day one, nothing is ever deleted, and every step of the ladder below comes with an email that says exactly where you are and how to fix it.

The ladder, day by day

WhenWhat happensWhat your team notices
Day 0, the charge failsAn email goes to your billing address, and admins see a banner on the Billing pageNothing, full access, business as usual
Days 0–7The card is retried automatically for about 7 days, with an email when a retry failsStill nothing, full access throughout
Around day 7The workspace goes read-onlyEveryone can sign in and look at everything; nothing can change
Around day 14The workspace pauses entirelySigning in leads to the Billing page and nowhere else
Any time payment succeedsFull access is restored instantlyEverything works again, immediately

What read-only actually means

Everyone on your team can still sign in and view the records their role allows. What stops is change: no new tasks, no edits, no time entries and no comments until payment succeeds. A persistent banner explains the situation to everyone, and for non-admins it names the admins who can fix it, so nobody wastes an afternoon thinking Current is broken. Your partners can still view their shared projects in the portal.

Note
Data retention during a payment pause
A payment pause does not itself delete workspace data. If your subscription ends, you have 30 days to request an export before the deletion schedule applies. See https://current.day/privacy for the retention periods and the records kept for legal and security purposes.
Note
The banner names the real reason
This whole ladder is about a failed charge. A workspace that has never had a card on file (one still inside its 7-day setup window, or that never chose a plan) can also go read-only, but for a different reason, and the banner says so: "choose a plan to continue," not "your payment is overdue." You'll never see a payment-overdue message on a workspace that never had a payment to miss.

What the emails say

Every email in the ladder follows the same shape: what happened, what happens next and when, and a link straight to the fix. The first one tells you the charge failed and that retries are running. The read-only notice tells you the workspace is now view-only and what restores it. None of them are mysterious "please contact billing" notes, each states the stage and the date the next stage arrives.

The two ways to fix it

  1. 1
    Update the card
    Billing page → Payment method → Update card. The new card is saved directly with Stripe (it never touches Current's servers), and the open payment is retried right away. If the new card works, access is back before the dialog closes.
  2. 2
    Pay the open invoice on Stripe's secure page
    If the card itself is fine (the failure was a limit, a hold, or a bank check) use the "Pay the invoice on Stripe" button on the banner. It opens Stripe's hosted payment page for the exact open invoice, and paying it there restores access just the same.
Tip
"My bank wants me to confirm the payment"
Some banks require you to personally approve a charge, a tap in your banking app or a one-time code. An automatic retry can never complete that, which is why the Retry payment button sometimes opens Stripe's secure page instead: that's where you give the bank its confirmation. Finish there, then refresh the Billing page. You'll be back in business.

Who to contact

If you're not an admin, the banner names the people who are. Billing is admins-only, so they're the ones who can fix the card. If you are an admin and the payment still won't go through after both fix paths, reach us from Help → Contact support and we'll sort it out with you. And if you're cancelling rather than fixing, see "Cancelling your subscription (and what happens after)", the ladder never decides that for you.

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