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Billing & subscriptions

Manage your StatusOwl subscription: update payment methods, view invoices, change plans, downgrade, or cancel — all through the Stripe customer portal.

Last updated May 9, 2026

StatusOwl uses Stripe for billing. Almost every billing action — payment method updates, invoice access, plan changes, cancellations — happens in the Stripe customer portal, which you launch from inside the StatusOwl dashboard.

This page walks through what each action does and what to expect.

Who can manage billing

Billing actions are gated to three roles:

  • Owner — Full control.
  • Admin — Full control.
  • Billing — Full control of subscription, payment method, and invoices. Read-only for everything else in the org.

Member and Viewer roles cannot start a subscription, change a plan, or update payment. See Roles & permissions for the full role matrix.

Starting a subscription

  1. Open Account → Billing in the dashboard.
  2. Pick the plan you want and click Start trial (or Subscribe if you've used your trial).
  3. You're redirected to Stripe Checkout. Enter your card or another payment method Stripe supports.
  4. After successful payment, you're redirected back to /account/billing with a success banner. The plan upgrade takes effect immediately — new limits (monitors, regions, integrations) are live before you finish reading the confirmation email.

If you cancel out of Checkout, the redirect lands on /account/billing with a cancellation banner; nothing changes on your account.

Updating your payment method

  1. Open Account → Billing.
  2. Click Manage subscription to launch the Stripe customer portal in a new tab.
  3. In the portal, click Add payment method or Update.
  4. Save. Stripe charges new invoices to the new card on the next billing cycle, or immediately if there's an unpaid invoice waiting.

The portal supports cards, bank-debit methods, and any other payment method Stripe has enabled for your region.

Viewing and downloading invoices

  1. Account → Billing → Manage subscription opens the Stripe portal.
  2. The portal lists every invoice, with downloadable PDFs.
  3. For accounting purposes you can also have invoices auto-emailed to a billing-only contact — set the recipient in the portal.

Invoices include the plan, billing period, proration details for upgrades / downgrades, and any one-off charges.

Switching plans

You can switch between paid plans at any time:

  1. Account → Billing → Change plan opens the Stripe portal's upgrade flow.
  2. Pick the new plan and confirm.
  3. Stripe prorates the change to the day. If the new plan is more expensive, you're charged the difference for the rest of the period. If it's cheaper, the difference is credited toward your next invoice.

Plan capabilities switch over immediately:

  • New monitor / member / region limits take effect right away.
  • Resources you have over the new plan's limit (e.g. 50 monitors when downgrading to a 25-monitor plan) keep running, but you can't create new ones until you're back under the cap.
  • API scopes that the new plan no longer grants stop working — your existing keys keep their key_prefix and metadata, but requests using a now-disallowed scope return 403. See Scopes — downgrade behavior.

Downgrading to Free

  1. Account → Billing → Downgrade to Free (or pick Free in the portal's plan picker).
  2. Confirm.

Stripe cancels the paid subscription immediately. Your plan flips to Free the same moment, and:

  • You keep all your monitors, status pages, and integrations. Nothing is deleted on downgrade.
  • Monitor check intervals snap to the Free plan's 3-minute floor.
  • API access is disabled (Free does not include API access).
  • Custom domains on status pages are disabled (the page reverts to its free *.statusowl.app URL).
  • Existing API keys remain in your dashboard; calls return 403 until you're back on a plan that grants the scope.

Canceling entirely

If you want to delete the org rather than continue on Free, downgrade to Free first, then delete the organization from Organization → Settings → Delete organization. Org deletion is permanent and removes all monitors, status pages, integrations, audit logs, and historical check data — schedule it deliberately.

Refunds

Stripe handles refunds per its own policy. We don't pre-emptively refund unused subscription time on a cancellation — the credited time sits on your account against future invoices instead. For a hard refund (e.g. accidental subscription, never used), contact support@statusowl.net with the invoice ID and we'll triage it case-by-case.

Failed payments

If a card declines, Stripe retries on its standard schedule (typically 3 attempts over 3 weeks) and emails you each time. After the final retry fails:

  • The subscription is canceled by Stripe.
  • The Stripe webhook fires and StatusOwl downgrades the org to Free.
  • All the same downgrade behaviors apply (monitors keep running on Free-tier intervals, API keys deactivate, etc.).

You can re-subscribe at any time from Account → Billing with a working payment method.

See also