Billing & Subscriptions

Organizations in your CI Account have a Billing tab in Organization settings. From it an organization owner or admin can put the organization on the Pro plan, add priced extras on top of it — custom domains, extra public subdomains, extra paired devices, user support — change how many of each the organization holds, and open the Stripe billing portal for invoices, the payment method and cancellation.

Billing is scoped to an organization, not to an individual account. Payment is handled by Stripe on Stripe-hosted pages; your card details never pass through the CI Account.

Plans

There is one plan per organization: Free or Pro. Pro is sold monthly or annually; both grant the same things.

Prices are in USD and are the same for every organization. There are no trials, coupons or custom pricing.

Companion Memory is free, on both plans. It is not something Pro unlocks: it installs from the store like any other free app, and the Hub offers it during setup whatever plan you are on. Earlier versions of this page listed it as a Pro feature; that was wrong and has been corrected.

Add-ons

Add-ons are à la carte extras on top of Pro. An organization on Free sees them locked with Requires the Pro plan.

Every add-on is billed as an item on the Pro subscription — there is one subscription per organization, and its items are the plan plus whatever add-ons you hold. That has three consequences:

• Adding or changing an add-on charges the card already on file, and removing one credits it; you are never sent back through Checkout.
• A change part-way through a billing period is prorated: Stripe bills or credits the difference for the rest of the period, and the new amount applies from the next invoice.
• The add-ons share the plan’s renewal date and end with the plan if you cancel it.

Subscribe to Pro

You need to be an owner or admin of the organization.

How the confirmation actually happens — the tab never trusts the return URL, only the record written by Stripe’s webhook:

flowchart LR
    A["Billing tab<br/>Subscribe"] --> B["POST /billing/checkout"]
    B --> C["Stripe Checkout<br/>hosted page"]
    C -->|"return to ?checkout=complete"| D["Billing tab<br/>Confirming"]
    C -->|"customer.subscription.created"| E["POST /api/webhooks/stripe"]
    E --> F["verify signature<br/>claim event id once"]
    F --> G["org_plan row<br/>pro, active, period end"]
    D -->|"polls GET /billing<br/>for about a minute"| G
    G --> H["Purchase confirmed<br/>Pro Active"]

Add, change or remove an add-on

All three happen on the add-on’s card in the Add-ons section and require the Pro plan.

Add. For the per-unit add-ons (Custom Domain, Extra Subdomain, Extra Device) the card’s Add … button opens a quantity dialog: pick how many with the stepper, up to the card’s ceiling (Up to 25 per organization for custom domains, 100 for the others), and confirm. User Support has no quantity — its button reads Add — $29.00/mo and adds it directly. The card shows Activating… until Stripe’s webhook records the new item, then a badge such as 5 active.

Change quantity. Click Change quantity on a per-unit add-on you already hold. The dialog opens on the number you currently have, shows the new monthly total, and notes that Stripe bills or credits the difference for the rest of this billing period; the new total applies once Stripe confirms it. On a deployment that enforces entitlements, reducing the Custom Domain quantity below the number of domains you have connected is refused — disconnect a domain first.

Remove. Click Remove on an add-on you hold. The confirmation says what happens: the charge stops and the capability is taken away immediately — for a per-unit add-on, all of the units at once (the dialog reads, for example, “Remove all 5 × Custom Domain?”). The unused part of the period you already paid for is credited against the next invoice. The Pro plan and every other add-on keep running.

Invoices, payment method and cancelling

Invoices, receipts, the payment method and plan cancellation all live in the Stripe billing portal, opened from the Invoices & payment button on the summary card or Manage in billing portal on the Pro card. The button appears for any organization that has ever paid, so you can still reach past invoices after cancelling.

In the portal you can:

• download invoices and receipts;
• update the card on file;
• cancel the Pro plan.

Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. Until then nothing changes: the Billing tab shows a Cancelling badge beside Active, and the summary reads “Cancelled. Pro stays active until date, then this organization moves to Free.” At period end the plan and every add-on end together and the organization returns to Free with its Free limits.

The portal does not let you change quantities or drop a single add-on — those are the Change quantity and Remove controls on the Billing tab, described above. While the plan is in its Cancelling window it is still active and owned, so the Billing tab does not offer Upgrade to Pro (a new checkout would be refused with 409 ALREADY_PURCHASED); reversing a pending cancellation is done in the billing portal. Once the period ends and the organization is back on Free, Upgrade to Pro returns to the Billing tab and re-subscribing is a fresh purchase.

What a plan actually enforces

A plan is a set of limits that the CI Account checks at the moment you use them, not a badge. What the current plan includes is shown in the summary card’s usage rows (public subdomains, paired devices, custom domains).

Companion Memory is not in this table because it is not limited by plan — it is free on Free and Pro alike.

Two things are worth knowing:

• Enforcement is a separate switch. Resolving the plan and refusing over it are controlled by different feature flags. An operator can leave billing.enforcement off, in which case the CI Account works out what it would refuse, logs it, and lets the action through. On hub.ci.computer enforcement is off today.
• The CI Account fails closed. A plan only counts when its Stripe record is present, trusted, active and inside its paid period. The one exception is a failed renewal, which keeps Pro for a grace period — see Failed payments. If the deployment has no Stripe key at all, every organization is treated as Free — even one with a Pro row in the database.

Failed payments

When a renewal payment fails, Stripe keeps the subscription past_due and retries the card. The CI Account keeps Pro, and every add-on on it, working for seven days from the first failure, then treats the organization as Free if the payment is still unpaid. A card declined on renewal day therefore costs nothing if you fix it within the week.

During those seven days the Billing tab shows an amber banner: Your last payment failed. with “Update your payment method by date to keep Pro.” After the deadline the banner turns red and reads Pro is paused because a payment failed. Either banner has an Update payment method button that opens the Stripe billing portal. Stripe retries the open invoice once the card is fixed, and a successful payment clears the banner.

While a renewal payment is unpaid, nobody can buy anything new: the tab offers Update payment method instead of Upgrade to Pro, and add-on purchases and quantity changes are refused with 409 PAYMENT_OUTSTANDING. Retries do not extend the deadline. A subscription that Stripe has ended (unpaid, canceled) gets no grace period.

Over the plan’s limits

An organization can hold more than its plan includes — because devices were paired or apps published before limits applied, or because a plan lapsed. Where billing.enforcement is on, the Billing tab then shows This organization is over its plan’s limits, listing each capability with what is in use against what the plan includes, for example “Paired devices: 2 in use, 1 included (1 over)”. Everything you already have keeps working, and custom domains stay paused until your plan includes them. To add more, buy an add-on or upgrade to Pro, or remove some. Home shows a matching notice above the device list when paired devices exceed the limit. With enforcement off, as on hub.ci.computer today, no notice appears and nothing is refused.

Who can see and change billing

The tab is also hidden — for everyone — when the deployment’s orgSettings.billing flag is off or the server reports that Stripe is not connected. Hiding it is deliberate: the CI Account never offers a purchase it cannot honour.

For developers

These endpoints back the Billing tab. All but the webhook are scoped to an organization you belong to; requests for organizations you are not a member of return 404, and every organization-scoped route returns 404 when the deployment’s orgSettings.billing flag is off. The webhook is the exception: it carries no session and no membership check, is authenticated by its Stripe signature alone, and is not behind that flag.

Three rules follow from the last row:

• Every purchase route answers with grantsEntitlement: false (or applied: false). The entitlement lands when Stripe’s customer.subscription.* event is verified and applied, so a client must poll GET …/billing until ownership.ownedFeatureKeys includes what was bought — which is exactly what the tab does.
• Nothing read from the Stripe API becomes an entitlement; only the webhook writes plan rows, and each event is applied at most once and only if it is newer than the last one applied for that subscription.
• 503 BILLING_NOT_CONFIGURED is terminal, not transient. From the purchase routes it means the deployment has no Stripe key. POST …/billing/portal answers with the same code when Stripe refuses the portal session — the customer-portal configuration was never saved for that mode, or the API key lacks the portal permission — even though a key is present.

The subdomain_pack key is a stable identifier that predates the rename to “Extra Subdomain”; read name and unitAmount from the catalog rather than hard-coding either.

Configuration (operators)

Names only — never commit or paste the values. Full setup, including creating the products and prices, the webhook endpoint, the portal configuration and test-mode versus live-mode, is kept with the CI Account source, which is not public.

Troubleshooting

See also: Organizations, Custom Domains.