Account & billing FAQ

Questions about your Tobren subscription (what you pay us). For the step-by-step of changing or cancelling your plan, see Managing your subscription. For what your customers pay you, see Payment setup; for tier prices and overages, see Pricing & overages.

Trials

How long is the free trial? 14 days. You pick a plan at signup and a card is collected, but you’re not charged until the trial ends. (Some promo codes let you start without a card, or extend the trial.) Each email gets one free trial. If your email has already had a trial or been the admin of a Tobren workspace — even one that was cancelled and deleted long ago — signup tells you so before anything is charged, and you can continue on a paid plan from day one (the first period is charged at signup). If you think you should get another trial, the signup page gives you our contact address to ask.

What can I do during the trial? Your trial runs on the plan you selected — team seats, active shoots, and photos-per-shoot follow that plan’s real limits, so it’s an accurate preview of what you’re buying.

What about storage and downloads during the trial? Unmetered in the sense that matters most: there’s no hard wall. Go past your selected plan’s storage or egress allowance during the trial and nothing stops — uploads and downloads keep working exactly like they would on a paid plan running over its allowance. The difference is what happens next: trial overage is never billed, not mid-trial and not at conversion. It’s simply written off, because a trial is meant to be a real, unrestricted preview — not a preview with an asterisk. This is a change from how the product used to behave (it used to stop you at the tier’s allowance); if you tried the trial a while back and remember hitting a wall, that’s no longer how it works.

If you started your trial without a card, it works exactly the same way — metered, no limits, nothing billed. The trial is 14 days either way.

When am I charged? At the end of the 14 days. We email a reminder 3 days before trial end with the date, and whether your card on file will be charged or you still need to add one. If nothing is due when the trial ends, the reminder says so and no card is needed.

What if the first charge fails? You move into a 7-day grace period rather than being cut off immediately. You keep full access, and a banner with a Resolve now button appears in Settings → Billing. We don’t auto-retry the first charge — you resolve it from Settings once your card is ready. If it’s still unresolved when the 7 days are up, the workspace is suspended (see Renewals & failed payments below).

Is the free trial the same as the Free plan? No — they’re two different, deliberately distinct things:

The 14-day trial is a temporary, full preview of the plan you choose when you sign up — Starter, Professional or Studio. Whatever you pick, the trial gives you that plan in full for 14 days.
The Free plan is a permanent, limited plan (no card, no expiration) — see Pricing & overages.

If your trial ends and you don’t want to subscribe, you’re not cut off — you get a 7-day grace period with full access first. The workspace only gets suspended if that grace period also lapses with no card on file. If you’d rather not wait for that, you can move yourself to the Free plan any time from Settings → Change plan — that’s a choice you make, not something that happens automatically when the trial ends.

Renewals & failed payments

When does my plan renew? On your anniversary day — the day of the month your current paid period started (for most studios, the day the trial ended) — at your plan’s rate. Annual plans renew yearly.

A renewal payment failed. What happens? We retry your card automatically once a day for 5 days:

You keep full access to your workspace throughout the retry window. A Payment failed banner shows the amount due and the suspension date. Fix it anytime in Settings → Billing: saving a new card charges it straight away, or Resolve now charges the card already on file.
Your customers are unaffected — their galleries and purchases keep working (their payments go to your own Stripe/Square, which we’re never in the middle of).

(The first-charge failure after a trial is handled a little differently — a 7-day grace period with no auto-retry; see Trials above.)

What if it still hasn’t gone through? After the retry window (or the trial grace period) the workspace is suspended: admin access is limited to the billing page, where a Resolve now button charges your card to reactivate immediately. Even while suspended, customers keep read access to photos they’ve already purchased — we don’t hold paid galleries hostage over a billing issue. Suspension clears automatically as soon as payment succeeds.

What if it stays suspended? A workspace suspended for non-payment that is still suspended 60 days after it was suspended is cancelled automatically, and we email the workspace owner when that happens. From then on it is like any other cancellation: the normal 30-day retention window starts that day, so you can still sign in and export your data before media is deleted (see Cancellation & data below). To keep the workspace, use Resolve now before the 60 days are up.

Overage alerts

What are the overage alert emails? Two separate emails, about two separate things — don’t confuse them:

Allowance warning (all plans) — sent at 80% of your plan’s included storage or egress. It means “you’re about to start incurring overage” (or, on the Free plan, “you’re about to hit the hard cap” — see Pricing & overages).
Overage spend alert (paid plans, optional) — sent at 80% of a dollar figure you set yourself in Settings → Billing. It means “your overage spend this billing period is approaching the number you set.” If you set $100, you hear from us at $80.

Do either of these block anything? No. Neither alert ever pauses, blocks, or restricts anything — they’re a heads-up, not a cap. You keep uploading, keep delivering, keep getting billed for overage as usual. The only thing that ever hard-stops uploads or full-resolution downloads is the Free plan’s storage/egress cap (see Pricing & overages) — the spend alert you set yourself never does.

What if I leave the spend-alert figure blank, or set it to 0? No spend alert is sent. (This is the opposite of what 0 meant in an earlier version of this setting, where it was the strictest possible limit — it no longer limits anything.)

Is the dollar figure in the spend alert my exact bill? It’s your overage incurred so far this period, before any account credit is applied — the email says so. We quote it gross rather than net because credit is spent against whichever charge lands first, so the balance the alert shows you today isn’t necessarily the balance you’ll actually owe once billing runs and any credit is applied. If you have account credit, your eventual charge can come in lower than the figure in the alert.

Changing plans

Upgrading to a higher tier Takes effect immediately with a prorated charge for the rest of the current period. Your renewal date doesn’t change.

Downgrading to a lower tier Takes effect at your next renewal, at the rate in force on that date — no charge today, and no credits or refunds either way. You keep your current tier’s limits until then.

Switching monthly ↔ annual

Monthly → annual applies immediately (your unused monthly time is credited against the annual charge).
Annual → monthly applies at your next renewal.

What if a price changes? Price changes are always announced in advance with an effective date — never applied mid-period. If you renew before that date, you keep your current price for your entire next period, including a full year if you’re on annual billing. If you renew on or after the effective date, the new price applies. See Pricing & overages for current rates.

Notes

The custom-domain add-on isn’t available on Free, so downgrading to Free removes it (effective at the downgrade date — we email you). Moving between paid plans keeps it.
You can’t change plans, or cancel, while a payment has failed or the workspace is suspended — resolve payment first.

Cancellation & data

How do I cancel? Settings → Billing → Cancel subscription. Your plan stays active until the end of the current period — you keep full access until then and there are no future charges after that date.

What happens to my galleries? When cancellation takes effect, the workspace stops taking changes: no new purchases, shoots or edits. A media retention window (30 days by default) follows. During it your customers can still open their galleries and download what they already have, and you can still sign in to export your workspace data. After the window, media, galleries, your customers and your business profile (address, phone, branding) are deleted, while invoices, receipts and billing records — and your customers’ order and purchase records — are kept for 7 years, then deleted.

We also keep a short record of who ran the workspace: each team member’s email and name, their role, the plan, and the dates they were active, so we can answer questions about the account later — years later if need be. That record has no 7-year limit: it is kept until someone asks us to erase it (see Data, privacy & deletion). The 7 years run from the later of the record’s own date and the day the workspace’s data was deleted, so nothing is deleted sooner than 7 years after the workspace is gone. While a workspace is active, Tobren’s own billing records for it (invoices, receipts, charges and usage) are deleted once they are 7 years old, but your customers’ orders and purchases are kept for as long as the workspace is. This 30-day media retention window is separate from the 30-day response SLA on a verified data-deletion request described in Data, privacy & deletion — the two are different 30-day periods for different purposes.

Can I come back?

Before your cancellation takes effect: click Reactivate from the banner. A paid plan needs a card on file to reactivate.
During the retention window: contact support to reactivate.
After the retention window: data is gone and the account can’t be restored.

Can I change plans while a cancellation is scheduled? Yes. A change that’s charged today — an upgrade, or switching to annual — pays for a period, so your cancellation moves to the end of that period (at the latest). The change preview shows the new date before you confirm, and the cancellation banner shows it afterwards. Your plan still ends then unless you reactivate. A scheduled change (a downgrade, or annual → monthly) doesn’t move the date.

Refunds? No pro-rated refunds — you keep access for the period you paid for. (We can issue goodwill credit in special cases — reach out.)

Can I get my old workspace URL back later? Not with a new sign-up while the cancelled workspace’s data is still held — its URL (slug) stays reserved and can’t be taken by anyone, you included. To keep it, contact support during the retention window to reactivate.

Still stuck?

Use the Feedback button in the app — it captures the page you’re on so we can help faster.