Billing & Plans
What Happens When a Payment Fails
When a renewal charge is declined, nothing is switched off straight away: Kapsule emails you, retries the charge automatically, and gives you a graded window to fix the card before anything stops serving.
Most failed payments are ordinary card problems: an expiry date that rolled over, a bank fraud hold on an unfamiliar overseas merchant, or a card with no headroom on it. This guide walks the exact ladder we follow, what each status in KPanel means, how to fix a failure yourself, and what happens if it is never resolved.
The Retry and Suspension Ladder
Kapsule works through a fixed sequence measured from the day the charge first failed. Every stage sends an email to your billing address.
| Days after the failure | What happens |
|---|---|
| Day 0 | The charge is declined. You get a payment-failed email straight away. |
| Day 1 | The card is retried. If it fails again, a second payment-failed email goes out. |
| Day 3 | The card is retried once more, with another email. |
| Day 7 | A service suspension warning email, naming the exact suspension date. |
| Day 14 | Services are suspended. Your sites stop serving and show a holding page. |
| Day 30 | The subscription is cancelled. |
You have a full two weeks of running service from the first decline, and another two weeks after suspension before the subscription is cancelled. There is plenty of room to fix this, but read every email in the ladder: they name the real dates for your subscription.
Your data is not touched at any step on this ladder. Suspension stops your sites serving and stops mail flowing. It is a switch, not a delete.
Reading the Status in KPanel
Open Billing in the left sidebar, then click Manage on the affected subscription. The status tile at the top tells you where you are:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Past Due | A charge has failed and the retry ladder is running. Services still up. |
| Grace Period | You are inside the window to fix the card before suspension. |
| Unpaid | Retries have been exhausted. Suspension is imminent or has happened. |
| Paused | Not a failure. You deliberately paused billing. |
| Cancelled | The subscription has ended. |
A banner sits above the tiles with the matching message:
- Payment Grace Period. "Your payment is in a grace period. Update your card before it expires to avoid suspension."
- Payment Overdue. "We could not charge your card. Update it and retry, or we will try again automatically."
- Payment Overdue, no card. "No payment method on file. Add a card to continue your subscription."
Fixing a Failed Payment
Step 1: Add or Update the Card
The banner itself carries the fix. Click Update Card (or Add Card if there is nothing on file) and you land on the Payment Methods page. Add a working card there and save it. Full walkthrough: Adding or Changing Your Payment Method.
Saving a new card to your account is not the same as attaching it to a subscription. Each subscription has its own Renewal Card panel that decides which card the next charge lands on. After you add a card, go back to the subscription and confirm the Renewal Card panel shows it. If it says "No card attached to this subscription", the next retry will fail exactly like the last one.
Step 2: Retry the Charge Immediately
You do not have to wait for the next scheduled retry. On the subscription detail page, the Actions panel offers Retry payment now. Click it once the correct card is attached. Success shows the toast "Payment received"; a decline shows "Payment failed" and the ladder carries on from where it was.
Step 3: Confirm It Cleared
Go back to Billing and open the Orders tab. Each row shows the date, order number, description, amount and status, with a View button for the detail. A settled renewal reads Paid. An invoice that is still stuck reads Failed, with the note "We could not process this invoice. Update your payment method and we will retry automatically" and an Update card button on the invoice itself.
Why Cards Get Declined
Most declines are decided by your bank, not by Kapsule, and we only ever receive a generic decline code. Check these in order:
- Expiry date. The Payment Methods page marks an out-of-date card with an Expired badge. This is by far the most common cause.
- A bank fraud hold. Kapsule is a New Zealand merchant. If your bank is elsewhere, a recurring overseas charge can trip a fraud rule the first time it appears. Approving it in your banking app usually clears it permanently.
- Insufficient funds at the moment the charge ran. Retry once the balance is there.
- A card that has been reissued. A replacement card has a new number, and the old one on file will keep failing until you save the new one.
- A debit card with no recurring authority enabled. Some debit cards need recurring payments turned on explicitly by the bank.
If you have more than one card, keep a second one saved on the account and mark it Default. A single expired card is the most common reason an otherwise healthy account walks the whole suspension ladder.
If Services Are Already Suspended
Suspension at day 14 sets your account access to suspended and flags the sites on that subscription so they serve a holding page instead of your content. Mailboxes on the subscription stop sending and receiving.
This is fully reversible. Add a working card, attach it to the subscription, and use Retry payment now. Once the charge clears, the subscription returns to Active and services come back.
At day 30 the subscription is cancelled outright. After that there is no invoice left to retry: you are buying the plan again rather than restoring it, and anything tied to that subscription has to be re-provisioned. If you are anywhere near that mark, contact support before the date rather than after.
Domains Are Handled Separately
A failed hosting charge does not put your domain registrations at risk, and a lapsing domain is not part of this ladder. Domains renew on their own schedule with their own reminders at 60, 30 and 7 days before expiry. If a domain renewal is what failed, open the domain and check the Settings tab: auto-renew lives there, alongside a Renew Domain add-on row that adds a year to the registration on demand.
Troubleshooting
I updated my card but the charge still failed. The card is saved to the account but probably not attached to that subscription. Open the subscription and set it in the Renewal Card panel, then retry.
I never got a payment-failed email. We send to the billing email on the account, which can differ from your login. Check it under Billing, then Billing details, and look in your spam folder.
"Retry payment now" is greyed out. Either there is no card attached to that subscription yet, or you are signed in with a role below Billing. Ask an Owner or Admin.
The amount on the failed invoice is not what I expected. Open the invoice from the Orders tab and read the Items section: it lists each line and the period it covers. If it still looks wrong, do not just pay it. See Billing and Invoices, then contact us.
I want to stop the plan rather than fix the card. Cancel it properly so it ends cleanly instead of being cancelled by the retry ladder. See Cancelling Your Plan.
If a charge keeps failing after you have confirmed a valid, attached card, open a support ticket with the order number from the Orders tab and the date of the last attempt.