Past-due & Suspension

Every Primcloud account is always in one of three billing states: Active, Past-due, or Suspended. The state changes automatically based on whether your invoices are paid, and it controls what you can do in the dashboard until any unpaid invoice is settled. This page walks through what each state means, how transitions happen, and how to recover if you land in Past-due or Suspended.

The three states#

What triggers Past-due#

Your account moves from Active to Past-due when an invoice charge fails and its automatic retry schedule finishes without succeeding. (For the retry mechanics themselves, see Invoices. The short version is that some errors fail immediately, some retry once, some run a full backoff.) When Past-due kicks in:

• The balance in the dashboard header turns red and shows what you owe, marked PAST DUE, with a link to your billing page.
• Anything that would grow your bill is blocked; anything that would leave it flat or shrink it is allowed.
• Your running apps keep running exactly as they were. No pods stop, no traffic gets dropped.
• A 14-day grace clock starts.

What Past-due blocks#

The rule is straightforward: anything that would increase what you owe is blocked; anything else stays available.

Blocked while Past-due:

• Creating a new application.
• Scaling a formation up (more replicas).
• Upgrading compute to a larger size.
• Rolling back to a previous deployment.
• Restoring a deleted application.
• Running a task: a command run on-demand against your current build.

Still allowed while Past-due:

• Scaling down or shutting formations to zero.
• Downgrading compute to a smaller size.
• Deleting applications, environments, domains, and anything else that reduces or eliminates cost.
• Editing secrets (a small release the current image gets rolled with, no build).
• Adding, verifying, or removing custom domains.
• Reading everything: logs, deployment history, invoices, metrics, dashboards.
• Updating your payment method: this is the one you probably came here to do.

The intent is that Past-due is a pause on growth, not a lockout. You can still get in, see what's happening, and take care of the outstanding invoice without having to escalate to support.

The grace period and warnings#

Past-due gives you 14 days to settle the outstanding invoice before the account is automatically suspended. Along the way, Primcloud sends two heads-up emails:

• 7 days out. A reminder that the account is past due, with a link to your billing page.
• 1 day out. A final warning that suspension will happen in the next 24 hours unless the invoice clears.

The grace clock resets the moment your outstanding invoice is paid. If a subsequent invoice fails later, a fresh 14-day clock starts from that failure.

What Suspended does#

If the 14 days lapse without payment, the account moves to Suspended. This is intentionally more visible than Past-due:

• Every environment you own is stopped. Long-running pods (web, workers) are scaled to zero: no compute meters, no traffic served.
• Every domain, both the *.primcloud.app default and any custom domains, starts serving a plain suspended placeholder page. Visitors see a page, not a 500 or a connection error, so it's clear what happened.
• The dashboard still works. You can sign in, view invoices, update your payment method, and pay the outstanding invoice. Everything read-only stays available, so you can figure out what's owed and settle it.
• Nothing is deleted. Applications, environments, deployment history, custom domains, secrets, logs: everything stays exactly where you left it and comes back the moment the account is Active again.

Suspension is Primcloud's floor for unpaid accounts. It stops the meter (no more charges while suspended), stops customer-visible traffic (no serving pages that might be broken because a database ran out of runway too), and keeps everything else intact so recovery is one payment away.

How to recover#

The recovery path from either Past-due or Suspended is to pay the outstanding invoice. (A disputed payment recovers differently; see Disputed payments.)

1. Open Account → Billing → Invoices in the dashboard.
2. Find any invoice in Open status.
3. If the last charge attempt failed because the card itself was invalid or expired, head to Payment Methods first, add or update the card, and promote it to default.
4. Hit Pay Now on the invoice and confirm. Primcloud runs a fresh charge for the invoice's full amount due against your current default card.

The moment the last unpaid invoice clears, your account moves back to Active. If you were Past-due, the header balance goes back to normal and the growth-blocked actions unlock immediately. If you were Suspended, Primcloud sends a "welcome back" email, restarts every environment you own, and traffic starts routing again. The placeholder pages go away as pods come up. Your apps come back exactly as they were when Suspended kicked in: same code, same secrets, same compute sizes, same custom domains.

Disputed payments#

Disputing a Primcloud charge with your card issuer (a chargeback) changes your account right away. (When an issuer only asks about a charge without making a chargeback, nothing on your account changes.)

• The invoice moves to Disputed. It can't be paid or refunded while the issuer decides.
• The card the payment was made on is removed from your account. You can add it again later.
• If another card is still on file, the account moves to Past-due and the 14-day grace clock starts, the same as for an unpaid invoice. The clock doesn't wait for the issuer: if the dispute is still open when it runs out, the account is suspended.
• If that was your only card, the account moves straight to Suspended and every running environment is stopped.

What happens next depends on the issuer's decision:

• The dispute is closed in Primcloud's favor. The invoice goes back to Paid. The account returns to Active once nothing else is unpaid or disputed and a payment method is on file. If you have no card, adding one restores the account.
• The dispute is upheld. The amount the issuer took back is owed again and the invoice goes back to Open. Add a payment method if none is on file, pay the invoice with Pay Now, and the account recovers the same way as for any unpaid invoice.

Effect on running apps at a glance#