Refunds and changing plans — Help

"Can I get a refund?" and "Can I switch to annual mid-cycle?" are the two billing questions that surface most often after the first month. The answer to both is usually yes, with a small amount of arithmetic that Stripe handles for you.

This article covers the refund policy, how plan changes are prorated, the timing of when money moves, and the few cases worth knowing about before you click.

The short version

If you cancel during your trial, you owe nothing and there is nothing to refund. The trial is free.

If you cancel a paid subscription, your access continues until the end of the period you've already paid for. There is no automatic refund of the unused time, but unhappy or special-case refunds are issued case-by-case on request to [email protected] (see below).

If you switch between monthly and annual mid-cycle, Stripe automatically prorates the change. You get credit for the unused portion of the plan you're leaving, applied against the plan you're moving to. You'll see the exact math before you confirm.

Cancelling and what you get back

Cancellation happens in the Stripe customer portal. Open Billing in 1pm, click Manage billing and payment, find your active subscription, click Cancel.

Once you confirm, the subscription is set to cancel at the end of the current billing period. You keep access until that date. No further charges happen. The day after the period ends, the subscription transitions to Cancelled and access pauses.

By default, cancellation does not refund the unused portion of the current billing period. The reasoning is that you've already paid for the runway you're sitting on, and most venues use that runway to wrap up final events before stepping away. If you've paid for a year and you cancel in month two, the default is that you keep access for the remaining ten months, not get ten months refunded.

If that default doesn't fit your situation, email [email protected] from the address on the account. Refund requests are evaluated case-by-case. We're not draconian about it. In particular:

If you accidentally subscribed to annual when you meant monthly and notice quickly, we'll refund the difference.
If you signed up, looked around, and realised within the first week or two that the product isn't a fit, we'll refund the recent charge in full. The reverse-trial logic: the trial should have caught this, but if it didn't, we'd rather you have your money back than have a grumpy ex-subscriber.
If a planning business closes or a venue is sold, we'll refund the unused portion of an annual subscription pro-rata on request.
If a payment was charged after an attempted cancellation that didn't go through cleanly, we'll refund the bogus charge.

The pattern: if it feels unfair, ask. We are not in the business of holding on to money that didn't buy you what you wanted.

Changing plans

Two plans, two ways to switch.

Monthly to annual. Open the Stripe customer portal, find your active subscription, choose the annual plan, confirm. Stripe charges you the annual price minus a credit for the unused portion of the month you've already paid. In most cases this means a single one-time charge somewhere between $160 and $179, depending on how far into the current month you are. The annual cycle starts immediately and renews twelve months from that moment.
Annual to monthly. Same flow, choose the monthly plan. Stripe applies a credit for the unused portion of your annual subscription to your account. That credit covers your future monthly charges until it runs out, and only then does your card get charged for the monthly fee. In most cases this means many months of "free" monthly subscription until the original annual prepayment is consumed.

The portal shows the exact math before you confirm. Read the page; the proration is usually generous in your favour.

A few notes:

Switching back and forth too often is technically allowed but rarely useful. Each switch resets the renewal date.
If you switch from monthly to annual right after a monthly charge (say, on day 2 of a fresh monthly cycle), you'll get almost a full month's worth of credit applied. If you switch on day 29 of the cycle, the credit is small.
Stripe does not charge a fee for switching. The only money movement is the proration math.

Failed payments and grace periods

If a card payment fails, Stripe retries automatically over a few days (typically three retry attempts spaced across about two weeks). During that window your subscription is "past due" rather than "cancelled", which means:

Access continues uninterrupted. The retry period is a built-in grace, not a hard wall.

The Billing page shows a Payment past due banner with a link to update your card.

Stripe emails you each time a retry fails. The emails describe what happened and what to do.

If you update your card in the portal, Stripe usually retries within minutes and the subscription pops back to Active.

If the retries are all exhausted without a successful payment, the subscription transitions to Cancelled and access pauses. At that point you can resubscribe from the portal whenever you're ready, and your data is held for nine months (or 270 days) before any automatic cleanup. See Inactivity and automatic deletion for the longer cleanup story.

A failed payment isn't a refund event: there's nothing to refund because the charge didn't go through. It's a payment-method-update event.

Resuming after cancellation

If you cancelled but you're still in your paid period, the portal lets you undo the cancellation with one click. The plan stays on the same renewal date as if you'd never cancelled. Nothing charges; you just stop the planned end-of-period drop-off.

If you cancelled and the access period has already ended, your subscription shows as Cancelled on the Billing page. To start again, open the portal and resubscribe. Your data is still intact (within the nine-month retention window). Crew links, however, are not: generated share links expire when access pauses and need to be re-issued after resubscription.

Receipts, invoices, and tax

Every successful charge produces a receipt. Receipts come from Stripe directly to the billing email on file.

The portal also has a full invoice history. Open the portal, scroll to the invoices section, click any invoice to download a PDF. Use these for your bookkeeping or for client expense reports.

If you need a tax invoice with specific business details (a business name, an address, a VAT/GST number), update those in the portal first and Stripe will use the new details on the next invoice. Past invoices stay as they were issued: Stripe doesn't retroactively rewrite invoices, and neither do we.

Sales tax / VAT / GST is applied automatically by Stripe in regions where 1pm is registered for it. The applicable rate appears on the invoice. If you're a business with a valid VAT/GST number, entering it in the portal removes the tax (reverse-charge) where the rules support it.

Currency and foreign-transaction fees

All 1pm prices are in US dollars. Stripe charges your card in USD; your bank converts to your local currency on its end. Most cards charge a small foreign-transaction fee for non-USD purchases on a USD-denominated transaction; this fee is between you and your card issuer.

If you want to know in advance roughly what you'll be charged in your local currency, your bank's app will usually tell you the current FX rate. The number on the 1pm Billing page and on the receipt is always the USD figure.

When the Billing page or portal won't open

If the portal won't load:

Try a different browser. Some privacy-extension-heavy browsers block the third-party redirect that opens the portal.

Disable browser extensions temporarily, then retry.

If the portal opens but the page itself is slow or shows an error, Stripe may be having a temporary issue. Try again in a few minutes.

If you click Manage billing and nothing happens at all, check that you're signed in to 1pm with the same account you originally subscribed under. The portal opens for the specific Stripe customer linked to your 1pm account; if you accidentally have two 1pm accounts, the portal opens for the one currently signed in.

If none of those help, email [email protected]. We can look at the link from our side and unblock you.

What you can't do

A few things are not currently supported:

Pausing the subscription. There is no "skip three months" lever. If you don't need 1pm during the off-season, cancel and resubscribe when you're ready. Your data is held for nine months and the resubscription is seamless if you come back within that window.
Splitting the subscription across multiple cards. Stripe supports one default payment method per customer. You can change which card is on file, but you can't have two cards each paying half.
Paying by invoice / wire / direct debit. Today, 1pm only accepts cards (via Stripe's standard methods, which includes Apple Pay and Google Pay where supported). If you're an agency or venue with a payables process that needs invoiced billing, email [email protected] (we hear this occasionally and want to know how often).
Different prices per region. Pricing is the same everywhere. A US planner and a UK planner pay the same USD amount.

When in doubt, ask

The honest summary of 1pm's billing posture: we'd rather help you than collect money you don't want to be paying. If you're stuck on any of this (refund, switch, pause, weird charge, anything), email [email protected] from the address on the account. A real person reads that inbox and will sort it.