When a payment fails: the exact timeline

5 min read · Updated Jul 21, 2026

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

When	What happens	What your team notices
Day 0 — the charge fails	An email goes to your billing address, and admins see a banner on the Billing page	Nothing — full access, business as usual
Days 0–7	The card is retried automatically for about 7 days, with an email when a retry fails	Still nothing — full access throughout
Around day 7	The workspace goes read-only	Everyone can sign in and look at everything; nothing can change
Around day 14	The workspace pauses entirely	Signing in leads to the Billing page and nowhere else
Any time payment succeeds	Full access is restored instantly	Everything works again, immediately

What read-only actually means

Read-only is looking, not touching. Everyone on your team can still sign in and see every project, task, deal, report, and document — nothing disappears and nothing is hidden. What stops is change: no new tasks, no edits, no time entries, 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

Your data is never deleted

Not at read-only, not at paused, not ever in this process. The ladder exists to get a payment fixed, not to punish anyone — the moment it's fixed, it's as if it never happened.

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
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
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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