Renewals and plan changes
Renew service months, understand the grace period, and schedule a different plan without duplicate charges.
Paid services renew manually. Openstead does not automatically charge a stored card. Every service displays its own paid-through date and purchase state.
Renewal timeline
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Two days before expiry | Openstead issues a renewal invoice and sends a notification |
| Before expiry | You can pay to extend service from the existing paid-through date |
| At expiry | The service enters a three-day grace period if it has not been renewed |
| After the grace period | Unrenewed compute pauses; database data and persistent disks are retained |
Open Billing → Invoice History, review the renewal invoice, and complete its checkout. If reserved promotional credit covers the invoice, use the explicit confirmation action to activate the next month.
Receiving an invoice does not mean payment has been taken. Even a fully credit-covered scheduled invoice requires your confirmation.
Early and late renewal
An early renewal extends the existing term. It does not discard the remaining paid days. Calendar-month terms preserve the billing-day anchor where the calendar permits: a term anchored on the 31st uses the last day of a shorter month and can return to the 31st later.
A late renewal starts when its payment is confirmed. Openstead does not charge a new term for the unpaid gap. Resuming or provisioning remains a separate operation after confirmed payment.
Change a plan
Review the new instance type and complete its quoted purchase. A plan change purchased during an active month applies at the current term's end and buys the following month. It is not an immediate replacement month with an invented proration credit.
The dashboard shows the effective date. Check it before purchasing if you need more capacity urgently; changing a form value does not resize the live service immediately.
Only one pending checkout or paid future month is permitted for the service. Resolve an existing payment before creating a conflicting purchase. A pending invoice without an unresolved submitted payment may be replaced when a different plan is selected.
Storage and downgrades
Downgrading compute does not shrink stored database data. The new quote accounts for retained allocation above the smaller plan's included storage.
Returning a web service to Free is available after its paid term ends and subject to Free feature restrictions. MySQL can use Free only if its existing allocation fits the 2 GiB cap and a free workspace slot is available. A larger disk is never silently shrunk to fit.
Pausing is different from deletion
An expired term pauses compute after the grace period. It does not automatically delete your database or persistent disk. Existing database backups still follow their displayed retention dates, and a paused database does not produce fresh scheduled backups.
An explicit service-deletion action is separate and can remove resources. Preserve required data and exports before choosing deletion.
If you paid but the service is not active
Inspect the payment and purchase statuses first. A payment may still await confirmation; a confirmed purchase can separately have a provisioning error.
Use the retry action for a confirmed purchase that needs provisioning attention. Do not pay the same invoice again merely because the app is not live. Contact support with the invoice number, purchase ID, payment reference, and redacted error if the status does not reconcile.