​

Failed payments & billing holds

A payment failure is a billing problem, not automatically a security incident or account deletion event.

​

What can happen

Depending on the active billing configuration, a failed payment can lead to:

• payment retry attempts
• customer notifications
• subscription status changes
• temporary grace behavior
• a billing-specific access hold
• eventual entitlement reduction or cancellation

​

Billing hold

Starfire’s account-state model supports the idea of a BILLING_HOLD-style condition so billing problems can be represented separately from suspension or security holds. The exact access restrictions during a billing hold are controlled by current product policy.

​

Recover

1. Open the supported billing/customer portal surface.
2. Review the subscription and payment-method state.
3. Update payment information when required.
4. Complete any provider-required recovery action.
5. Allow webhook/reconciliation processing to update Starfire.
6. Refresh the billing page and confirm entitlements.

​

If payment succeeds but access remains restricted

Check reconciliation rather than paying again. The billing chain can lag or fail independently after the payment processor accepts a recovery payment.

​

Organization subscriptions

For organization billing, failed-payment behavior can affect team entitlements. Organization owners/admins should investigate promptly because many members can depend on one subscription.

​

Administrators

Operators should inspect billing-account state, Stripe subscription/invoice state, webhook processing, reconciliation, and resulting entitlements before manually lifting a hold.