What Happens If My Payment Fails?

Your card declines. Your bank flags it. Stripe rejects it. Whatever the reason, here is exactly what happens, day by day. Full operational details live in /legal/refund-policy and our internal Dunning Playbook.

Day 0 — First Failure

• Stripe tells us the charge failed. We schedule a retry in 24 hours.
• You get an email titled "We couldn't process your payment."
• Your service keeps running. Nothing pauses yet.

Day 3 — Second Failure

• We retry the card. If it fails, we schedule a third attempt for Day 7.
• You get an email titled "Action required — update your payment method."
• A yellow banner appears on your dashboard with a one-click reactivate button.

Day 7 — Third Failure

• One more retry. If it fails, your account goes on hold in 3 days.
• You get an email titled "Last attempt before service pause."

Day 10 — Account On Hold

• New scans pause. New automated removals pause. Re-scans pause.
• Your dashboard becomes read-only — you can still see everything we have ever done for you, manage your profile, and update billing.
• Removals already submitted to brokers do NOT roll back. Once we have emailed an opt-out request to a broker, that request stays submitted forever. We do not contact brokers to undo anything.
• Your PII vault is intact and encrypted.

Day 30 — Cancellation

• Subscription is cancelled. No more retries. No more charges.
• Your account moves to the Free tier shell.
• You get a 50% off coupon valid for 30 days if you want to reactivate.
• PII is retained for 90 days, then permanently purged (consistent with Terms of Service §13).

Fastest Way Out Of This

Update your card at any point: Settings → Billing → Payment Method. Service un-pauses the moment a charge clears, no support ticket required.

If your card is fine and your bank is the problem, call the number on the back of your card and authorize charges from DeData Privacy Labs. That fixes 80% of these cases on the first try.

When To Email Us

If a charge looks wrong, the amount is unfamiliar, or you want to cancel cleanly instead of letting it lapse, email billing@dedatalabs.org. A human responds within 1 business day. Do this before any chargeback — see the refund article for why.