Grace, suspended, and canceled account states

What this is

When a card payment fails, Verinode does not cut you off the moment Stripe reports the failure. It gives you a short, visible grace window to fix the card, and only moves to a read-only state if that window closes unfixed. A thin status banner sits above the app shell, just below the top navigation, and tells you exactly where you stand: nothing wrong, a payment that needs attention, or an account that has gone read-only. This article covers all three states, plus what happens after a membership is fully canceled, where that is handled instead.

The banner is computed fresh every time a page loads, straight from your subscription record, there is no separate cron or delay involved. Fix your card and the banner clears on your very next page load.

Where you'll see it

You do not navigate to this banner, it appears on its own, above the sidebar, on every page in IQ, whenever your account has a payment problem. The rest of the time it is simply not there.

The two states that DO produce a banner:

• Payment failed (grace), a copper-tinted bar.
• Account suspended · read-only, an Ember Red bar.

A third state, a fully canceled membership, produces no banner at all. That is by design and is covered in its own section below, along with where to actually go to check on it.

If you manage billing, the day-to-day controls, updating your card, canceling, reactivating a scheduled cancellation, reviewing invoices, live on the Billing tab under Settings. Your Intelligence Unit balance and how you top it up are a separate page, Account, then Billing, at /account/billing, covered in Reading your IU balance and Managing a recurring IU subscription. This article is about the payment-status banner specifically, not the IU balance.

Payment failed: the grace state (copper)

What triggers it. Stripe attempted to charge your card on renewal and the charge failed. The moment that happens, Verinode stamps the date and starts a 7-day grace clock. For the first 7 days past that date, your account sits in grace: you keep full write access, IQ keeps working, nothing is blocked, but you carry a visible warning until the card is fixed.

What you see. A copper bar reading:

• A small-caps label, PAYMENT FAILED.
• Beside it: "We could not charge your card." followed by a countdown, "N days left to update before IQ goes read-only" (singular "1 day left" when N is 1). On the last day of the window, once there are no days left to count down, the line instead reads "IQ goes read-only soon."
• On the right, an Update payment method button.

What "N days left" means. Verinode counts whole days elapsed since the failed charge. Day 0 through day 7 past the failure is grace; the countdown is simply 7 minus the days already elapsed, so it starts at "7 days left" the day the charge fails and counts down from there.

What the button does. Update payment method takes you to the Billing tab in Settings. There, under Payment, the Card row shows your card on file (brand and last four digits, with its expiry) and an Update button (it reads Add instead if no card is on file yet). That button opens a Stripe-hosted customer portal session where you enter new card details. Stripe retries the charge on its own schedule; once a retry succeeds, the grace banner clears on your next page load, no separate action needed on your side.

Account suspended · read-only (Ember Red)

What triggers it. If the grace window closes with the card still unfixed, 8 or more days past the original failed charge, your account moves from grace to suspended. This is the read-only state.

What you see. An Ember Red bar reading:

• A small-caps label, ACCOUNT SUSPENDED · READ-ONLY.
• Beside it: "Your payment is N days past due. IQ commands and edits are paused. Your data is intact."
• On the right, a Restore access button.

What "N days past due" means. The same day count as grace, just past the 7-day cutoff, whole days elapsed since the original failed charge.

What "read-only" means in practice. IQ commands and edits are paused: you are not asking your Co-COO to do new work, and you are not writing new changes. Nothing already in Verinode is touched. The banner's own words are the operative promise here: "Your data is intact." Every job, decision, benchmark, and document you have stays exactly as it was; suspension pauses what happens next, it does not roll anything back or delete anything.

What the button does. Restore access goes to the same Billing tab in Settings as the grace button. Update your card there through the Stripe customer portal, and once the retried charge succeeds, the account clears back to normal on your next page load, the same way grace clears.

When there's no banner at all

Most of the time you will see nothing above the shell, and that is the normal, healthy state. A few account conditions all resolve to no banner:

• An active membership in good standing.
• A membership mid-trial (Stripe's own trial period, separate from the one-time IU starter trial new operators get).
• A comp account (a manually granted account with no card on file at all, no Stripe charge to fail).
• No billing record at all, which is the free Contributor tier before anyone has added a card.
• A membership that has been fully canceled, covered next.

None of these should read as "something is wrong." The banner exists specifically to surface a payment problem you need to act on. Absence of a banner just means there isn't one.

Canceled memberships: no banner, handled in Settings instead

A fully canceled or lapsed membership does not produce a banner above the shell. This is deliberate: by the time a membership is actually canceled, the moment for a payment-recovery nudge has passed, there is no card retry to wait on. What you'll actually see instead:

• Your membership tier reverts to the free Contributor tier: peer benchmarks and Verinode-derived scores blur again the way they do for any Contributor account, and AI actions draw against the one-time starter IU allocation rather than a monthly plan allotment.
• The Billing tab under Settings reflects the change: your card on file, invoice history, and status are all still visible there, it just no longer shows an active paid plan.
• Starting again means starting a new membership from the tier options (see Membership tiers and upgrading), not "reactivating" the old one. Reactivate is a different, narrower control described below, for cancellations that have not taken effect yet.

The "set to cancel" state, and Reactivate

There is a second, distinct cancellation state worth knowing, one that happens BEFORE a membership is actually canceled: scheduling a cancellation for the end of your current billing period. Canceling from the Billing tab does not cut you off immediately, it flags the membership to end when the period you already paid for runs out.

While that flag is set, the Billing tab shows:

• Under Membership, the value "Set to cancel" with a note reading "Ends {date}," the last day your current period covers.
• A Reactivate button in place of the usual Cancel button.

Clicking Reactivate un-sets the flag before the period ends: your membership simply continues, billed normally on the next cycle, nothing else changes. This only works while the membership is still technically active and merely scheduled to lapse. Once the period actually ends and the membership fully cancels, this button is no longer the relevant control, at that point you are looking at a genuinely new membership, not a resumed old one, per the section above.

Best-practice example

Say a card on file expires and the renewal charge fails on a Monday. You open IQ Tuesday morning and see the copper bar: "We could not charge your card. 6 days left to update before IQ goes read-only." You click Update payment method, land on the Billing tab, and update the card through the Stripe portal. Stripe's next retry succeeds overnight, and by Wednesday morning the banner is gone, nothing else about your account ever changed. Contrast that with letting the same failure run past day 8: the bar turns Ember Red, reads "Your payment is 8 days past due. IQ commands and edits are paused," and IQ stops taking new commands until the same card update clears the balance. Your data was never at risk either way, the only difference is how long you waited to fix the card.

Data sources