Failed Payments
Cards expire, banks decline, limits get hit. When Stripe cannot take a Brikly payment, nothing disappears straight away: you get told twice, in the app and by email, and your access carries on while you sort it out.
How you find out
The email
The account owner gets an email titled "Your Brikly payment didn't go through". It names the Briks the payment covers, the amount in the currency your subscription is billed in, and gives you two ways to fix it:
- Update payment method - takes you to Settings > Subscription, where you can open the Stripe billing portal.
- Pay this invoice directly - a Stripe-hosted link to settle that one invoice without changing the card on file.
If Stripe has another retry scheduled, the email tells you the date it will try again. On the last attempt there is no retry left, so that line is left out rather than promising something that will not happen.
This email is not marketing, so unsubscribing from Brikly updates does not switch it off. A billing failure is something you need to know about.
The banner
Everyone in the workspace sees an amber notice at the top of every page: "Your last payment didn't go through".
- Owners and admins get an Update payment method button, which opens the Stripe billing portal and returns you to Settings > Subscription when you are done.
- Members and viewers are told to ask the account owner instead, so nobody is left clicking a button they cannot use.
- Everyone gets a View billing link through to Settings > Subscription.
The banner cannot be dismissed. It clears itself once the payment goes through and the subscription is active again, which is the same signal that the problem is genuinely fixed.
Why the email can arrive more than once
Stripe retries a failed card on its own dunning schedule over the following days. Each genuine attempt that fails sends one email, so a card that keeps being declined will tell you more than once. That is deliberate: the whole point of the notice is that a quiet failure ends in lost access.
If you have already updated the card, you can ignore anything that arrives from an earlier attempt. The banner is the reliable signal: once it has gone, you are up to date.
How long you have
While a payment is outstanding your subscription is past due, and everything keeps working. Access continues for a grace period of 14 days after the end of the billing period the payment covers. If it is still unpaid at the end of that window, Brik access stops: opening a Brik shows a subscription card instead of your data.
Nothing is deleted when access stops. Your recipes, invoices, ingredients and records are all still there. Settling the payment restores access to them.
Fixing it
- Go to Settings > Subscription (or click Update payment method in the banner or the email).
- Click Manage Billing in Stripe to open the billing portal.
- Add or update the card, then save.
- Stripe retries the outstanding invoice. Once it clears, the banner disappears on the next page load.
If the card is fine and the payment still fails, the fastest route is the pay this invoice directly link in the email. That settles the outstanding amount immediately, and you can update the card on file afterwards.
Only owners and admins can open the billing portal. If you are a member or a viewer, send the email on to whoever owns the account rather than waiting for it to resolve itself.
If you cannot fix it
Reply to the payment failed email, or contact us as described in Getting Help. If there is a genuine reason you need longer than the grace period, tell us before access stops rather than after.