What changed: unpaid usage and your balance

When your account is billed for what you used, that charge is sometimes not collected the first time: an expired card, a bank that refuses it, a limit reached. What happens after that is what changed. This guide explains how those uncollected charges behaved before, how they behave now, and what you have to do about one.

How it worked before

A usage charge that could not be collected was retried for ever. Every day brought another attempt, and every attempt failed for the same reason, so the charge sat in your usage history as a permanent failure with a count of how many times it had been tried. There was no point at which it stopped being a pending payment and became something you could simply pay off.

How it works now

Each uncollected charge carries a window of its own. It is fifteen days by default, counted from the day that charge itself failed — not from some earlier failure of something else. Inside the window the charge is retried as before, so a card you fix in time settles it with nothing further to do.

When the window runs out, the amount stops being chased. It joins the outstanding balance of your account, which adds up everything left unpaid. From then on the charge no longer reads as a failed payment in your history: it is part of one amount you can settle in one go. Settling the balance leaves it settled, and the charges behind it show as paid against the payment that covered them.

A usage charge that fails with no subscription left to bill it on goes to the balance straight away. There is nothing to retry against, so nothing waits.

The count of attempts is gone. It is no longer shown anywhere in your usage history.

A charge that fails when a usage period closes now warns you. It appears on your billing page and opens the same grace window any other failed payment gets, so you find out at the moment it happens rather than the next time you go looking.

Why it changed

Retrying for ever produced nothing but noise. A charge that failed because the card is gone will fail again tomorrow, and telling you it had failed forty times gave you a number you could do nothing with: it did not say what to pay, or where to pay it. Giving each charge a deadline of its own and then turning what is left into a single balance replaces a growing list of failures with one amount and one action.

What you may need to do

If you have an outstanding balance, a notice at the top of each page says so, and its Settle balance button opens the Outstanding balance page. Settle it there with your card: it covers everything that stopped being retried, and paying it once clears all of it at the same time. Until it is settled, the rest of the application sends you back to that page.

If a charge is still inside its window and it failed because of your payment method, update the card and the next attempt collects it, with no balance created at all. How usage is measured and when it is billed is in Sell usage with meters and packages.