Your Plan, Your Card and Your Invoices in One Place
The Billing tab holds everything about what you pay: which plan you are on, the card on file, your invoice history, and a checkout if you want to change any of it. You never have to leave your account to sort out billing, and you never have to email anybody to do something routine.
Subscribing from inside your account
There is a real checkout in the tab, not a link out to a separate page. It works the same way the public plans page does, with one difference that matters: you are already signed in, so the account being subscribed comes from your session rather than from anything in the request. There is no way to accidentally subscribe the wrong account.
Plan identifiers come from one shared list, so what you see in the tab and what you see on the plans page cannot drift apart into two versions of the truth.
Two guards sit behind the button. It refuses to run against a subscription that is already live, so nobody gets double-charged, and it refuses to run against a comped account, so nobody who was given their account starts getting billed for it.
A principle worth stating out loud
A page whose job is to take money should degrade toward being able to take money.
That sounds obvious and it is not how most billing pages behave. The usual pattern is that anything unexpected upstream takes the whole page down, which leaves a customer who wants to pay you with no way to do it. That is the worst possible failure for the one page where the customer is trying to give you money.
So the tab is built to keep the payment form on screen. If something about an existing subscription cannot be read, the tab still loads, says plainly what it could not read, and still shows the plans and a working card form. A subscription that exists but has been canceled is reported as canceled rather than as an error, so you can start a new one instead of looking at a dead page.
One thing that happens together
Activating a subscription writes both the subscription itself and your account status in the same operation, and canceling resets both.
They travel together on purpose. Most of the platform checks your account status rather than reading the subscription directly, so a paying member whose status had not been updated would read as free almost everywhere it counts. Keeping the two in step is what stops that.
Related
What happens when a card expires is what past due actually means, and what a subscription unlocks is two add-ons unlock everything. The history is in the payment plans and the rewards plan.
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