--- title: "What happens if a payment fails" description: "A payment failed: what the notice means, what stays available while Stripe retries, how to update your payment method, and what happens if it never clears." canonical_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/account-and-plan/what-happens-if-a-payment-fails" last_updated: "2026-10-07" md_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/account-and-plan/what-happens-if-a-payment-fails.md" --- # What happens if a payment fails When a payment fails your access does not stop: Fincanva keeps everything your plan covers while the payment is retried, shows a notice on every page until it clears, and you resolve it by updating your payment method. ↗ See this in Fincanva — Settings, on the Payments and invoices page, under Payment method ## Steps 1. **Read the notice above the page.** It appears on its own, on every page of the app, while a payment Fincanva expected is uncollected, and it cannot be dismissed. Its wording says which case you are in: a refused renewal — "A payment for your subscription didn't go through. Update your payment method to keep your access.", commonly an expired card, a block by the bank or insufficient funds — or a first payment not yet arrived — "We haven't received your first subscription payment yet. Check your payment method if nothing arrives.", where a method that settles over several days may simply still be completing. 2. **Keep working.** Neither case changes your plan: your strategies still run, your screeners still return matches, your [Live strategies](/glossary/live-strategy) still update. The plan pass on **Settings → Plan and usage** still names your plan, and **Your subscription** reads `A renewal payment didn’t go through` — "You keep Advanced while we retry." — or `We haven’t received your first payment yet`. 3. **Select Update payment method** — on the notice itself, or in **Your subscription** on **Settings → Plan and usage**. On **Settings → Payments and invoices**, the payment method's **Update** opens the same page (**Manage on Stripe** for a kind of method it does not draw). 4. **Wait while the button reads "Opening payment settings…".** Fincanva does not handle card details: it hands you to Stripe, the payment provider that holds them. 5. **Add or replace the payment method on the Stripe page and confirm it there**, with any extra confirmation your bank asks for. Then return to Fincanva. **Done.** The notice is gone from every page and **Your subscription** no longer reports a failed payment — once Stripe reports the payment to Fincanva, normally within seconds of the provider accepting it. Nothing else has to be re-done. ## How long do I have before this becomes a problem? Fincanva does not set that deadline, and deliberately publishes none. The retry schedule belongs to Stripe: it decides how many times to re-attempt the charge, how far apart, and when to give up, so any countdown here would be a number Fincanva cannot keep true. What you can rely on is the notice: it stays for exactly as long as the payment is uncollected, and disappears by itself as soon as Stripe reports the change, in either direction. The first refused charge is not a decision to stop serving you — treating it as one would cut off someone whose card simply expired. ## What happens if the payment never goes through? Your subscription ends, and paid access ends with it; **Your subscription** says so in advance: "Update your payment method — if the retries don't go through, the plan ends." **Nothing you have built is deleted.** Strategies, screeners and their results all remain. Work beyond your current plan stops running rather than disappearing, and running it is refused in words that name the plan — `This strategy is outside your {currentPlan} plan, so it cannot run.` Subscribing again restores the access; the work was never removed. Deleting an account is a separate action you take yourself — see [account deletion](/glossary/account-deletion); a failed payment never triggers it. ## What does Settings → Plan and usage show once the subscription has ended? The plan pass reads **Free** — the name an account that never subscribed sees — with **"No active subscription."** in place of a price, and its level indicator reads **Level 0 of 3**: Free sits on Fincanva's plan scale, unheld — see [plan level](/glossary/plan-level). **Your subscription** still says what happened: `Your {plan} plan ended on {date}`, or — when the subscription closed because the retries ran out rather than because you cancelled — `Your {plan} plan ended — the payment was never collected`, each followed by "Everything you built is still here. Subscribing again restores access to it." After a cancellation the action is **Choose a plan**, the same plan picker as a first subscription; after retries ran out it is **Update payment method**, because that ending is a payment that never arrived. ## What if the payment notice does not go away? ### The strip is still there after I updated my card Open a page again: the billing state is read fresh on each page load, so the strip clears on the next load rather than the instant the Stripe page closes. If it persists, the new method has not been accepted yet — the Stripe page shows the payment's own status. ### "Couldn't open the payment portal. Try again." The handover to Stripe did not complete. Select **Update payment method** again, or use the one in **Your subscription** or **Update** on **Settings → Payments and invoices**, which open the same place. ### I never subscribed, and I'm seeing a payment notice The notice appears only for an account with a subscription whose payment is uncollected, never on the free plan — check which account you are signed in with on **Settings**. Fincanva is for education and illustration only. It is not personalised financial advice, and past or simulated results do not predict future ones. [Read the Terms Addendum](https://fincanva.com/terms/addendum#section-3)