Failed payments

If your monthly charge fails — expired card, insufficient funds, a bank flagging the transaction, anything Stripe couldn’t process on the first try — your Rivet service stays on. Stripe runs an automatic retry schedule for the next several days, you get an email each time, and you have plenty of room to fix it before anything changes inside Rivet.

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What “your service stays on” means

During the retry window:

• Your phone line keeps receiving calls and SMS.
• Voicemails keep being transcribed and auto-replied to.
• Video sessions keep working.
• The app stays accessible — no blocker over the inbox.
• Your clients see no difference.

We don’t want a transient payment hiccup to cause your practice line to go silent. Stripe’s retries are designed exactly for this — most failures are recoverable within a day or two, and gating service on the first failure would be heavy-handed.

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Stripe’s retry schedule

Stripe attempts the charge again on this schedule (the standard “Smart Retries” schedule): Each attempt sends you an email from Stripe. The email includes:

• The amount that failed.
• The reason Stripe got back from the card network (e.g. insufficient_funds, expired_card, card_declined).
• A link to your Stripe customer portal to update the card.

If a retry succeeds, the cycle ends and you go back to normal monthly billing.

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When service is paused

If every retry fails through to the end of the schedule (about 14–16 days after the original charge), Rivet treats your subscription as in the same state as a fully expired trial — the day-15 blocker appears over your inbox, and your subscription status flips to expired in the background. What happens at that point:

• The back-end stays running (same posture as the trial-expired state). Inbound voicemails are still captured, auto-replies still fire, your clients’ experience doesn’t change yet.
• The blocker over your inbox prevents you from managing conversations from the app until payment is resolved.
• The Activate my account button on the blocker takes you to the Stripe checkout, where you enter a fresh card and resume the subscription.

Once you fix the payment, the blocker disappears within a minute and service resumes normally. If the unpaid state continues beyond 30 days, see Canceling your account for what happens to your number and data.

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Fixing a failed payment

If you can’t find the Stripe email, request a fresh customer portal link from hello@getrivet.ca. We’ll generate one for the address on your account.

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Common reasons a card fails

In rough order of how often they show up:

• Expired card. The most common one. Update the expiration in the customer portal; the card itself is otherwise fine.
• Insufficient funds. Stripe retries automatically a few days later — most cards have funded by then. If not, add a backup card to the portal and Stripe falls back to it.
• Bank declined. Sometimes the bank flags a recurring charge as suspicious if your spending pattern has changed. A one-line call to your bank (“approve recurring charges from Stripe / Rivet”) usually resolves this.
• Card was replaced (the bank issued a new number after a fraud flag, theft, or routine reissue). The old number stops working immediately. Update the card in the portal.

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Why we don’t pause service immediately

A few reasons:

• Most failures are transient. Insufficient funds clears in a couple of days; expiring cards are usually replaced before they fail; bank flags resolve with a phone call. Pausing service on attempt one would punish people for things that fix themselves.
• Your clients shouldn’t be involved. If your card fails and service halts, your clients see “Sorry, this practice line isn’t accepting calls right now” — a confusing message about a problem that isn’t theirs. Keeping service on means the failure is between you, Stripe, and us; your clients never know.
• The retry window is long enough. Two weeks is plenty of time for most practitioners to notice and act, even on a vacation week.

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