What happens if a payment fails

A card expires, a bank blocks a charge, a payment bounces. ColdMerge does not punish you for it, and it does not quietly keep sending as though nothing happened either. It does two things in order: it warns you, and then, only if the warning runs out of road, it pauses sending.

Nothing is deleted at any point.

Step one: the grace period

The moment a payment fails, your workspace goes to the status Payment past due and an amber banner appears on the Billing screen: “Your last payment failed.”

During this window you are still in good standing. That is not a figure of speech, it is the actual rule the product uses to decide whether to send. In practice:

• campaigns keep sending, on their normal schedule
• follow-ups keep going out
• replies keep being detected
• everything else in the app works exactly as before

The banner asks you to update your card on Stripe before the window ends. That is the whole ask. Fix the card and nothing else ever happens.

The grace period is roughly a couple of weeks. It is not a fixed timer inside ColdMerge: the window is Stripe’s own card-retry schedule, during which Stripe retries the charge and emails you about it, and the pause comes only when Stripe gives up on collecting.

Step two: the pause

If the grace period runs out with the payment still unpaid, your workspace falls out of good standing. The status becomes Lapsed and the banner turns red: “Sending is paused.”

What pauses is sending, and only sending. No new campaign mail goes out and no follow-ups go out.

What keeps working:

• your data. Contacts, lists, campaigns, templates, and history all stay put.
• your queue. Nobody is dropped from a campaign, and the order is kept.
• compliance. Unsubscribes still work, and anyone on your suppression list is still never emailed. Those are legal duties, not paid features, so they never pause. See Unsubscribes & suppression.
• signing in, reading your results, and editing anything you like.

How a paused campaign looks

You do not have to be on the Billing screen to notice. A campaign that is held up by billing says so on its own page, with an amber banner reading “Sending is paused because billing is not up to date” and a Go to Billing button. Under it: “The queue stays put; sending resumes once the account is paid up.”

In the campaign list, the same campaign shows a Paused, billing badge instead of its usual status.

This banner is not a switch someone flipped on your campaign. It is worked out fresh every time the page loads, from your workspace’s billing standing. That is why it disappears on its own the moment the bill is paid.

Getting back to normal

1. Go to Settings, then Billing.
2. Select Manage billing to open Stripe’s portal.
3. Update the card, or pay the outstanding invoice.
4. Come back to ColdMerge.

Sending resumes by itself. There is no resume button to press and no campaign to relaunch: the queue picks up where it stopped, oldest work first, under the usual sending window and daily budgets. The red banner and the Paused, billing badges go away as soon as your standing returns.

A pause is not always about money

Two different things can stop mail, and they read differently on purpose.

• Sending is paused because billing is not up to date means the whole workspace has lost good standing. Everything stops.
• Paused: more mailboxes connected than your plan allows means only the extra mailboxes beyond your plan’s limit are parked. Your other mailboxes carry on sending. See Plans and billing.

There is also a pause that has nothing to do with billing at all: a campaign whose bounce rate climbed too high is stopped automatically, and it stays stopped until you restart it by hand. That one is covered in Campaigns & sequences.

A trial that ends without a card is not a failed payment

Starting a trial never asks for a card (see Plans and billing), so a trial that reaches day 7 with still no card on file is not this page’s story at all. No card was ever charged, and nothing was ever declined, because there was never a card to try in the first place. Stripe simply cancels the trial, and your workspace lapses through the exact same “Sending is paused” state described above: nothing is deleted, your data and queue stay put, and the campaign and campaign-list treatment is identical.

The one difference is the words. The Billing screen’s red banner adds a line for this case: “Your free trial ended. Subscribe to resume sending; your campaigns and contacts are exactly as you left them.” Select Subscribe rather than Manage billing: a lapsed trial has no card on file yet to manage, so getting back to normal here is the same Stripe checkout that started the trial, not the customer portal. It collects a card and does not grant a second trial.

If you cancel instead

Cancelling is not the same as failing a payment. You keep full access until the end of the period you already paid for, and the Billing screen shows an amber “Your subscription will not renew” banner with an Ends on date instead of Renews on. When that date passes, the subscription lapses and sending pauses, exactly as above.