Your subscription, and what happens when it runs out

Every website you create starts on a trial. When that runs out, or when a subscription you were paying for lapses, your website goes through a short sequence of states, and only the last one has any effect on your visitors.

Your work is never at risk. Even in the very last state (where visitors can no longer reach the website) the builder still opens and everything you built is exactly where you left it. Paying puts the site back online; nothing has to be rebuilt.

The four states

The Subscription section shows a coloured badge:

The builder shows you the same thing as a banner across the top: blue while you're on trial and counting the days down, orange once a subscription has lapsed, red once the site is offline. The banner is a link straight to the order screen.

A trial that runs out goes straight to Offline. The 14-day window only exists after a subscription that was actually paid for at some point. A trial gets no such window: the day it ends, the website stops answering. If you plan to keep the site, order before the trial is out.

What "Offline" means

Only the public website stops. Concretely:

• Anyone visiting your website (on your own domain or on the free address it came with) gets a ClickWhale page instead of your site, with a button to reactivate.
• The builder opens as normal. You can keep editing, saving and publishing.
• Nothing is deleted. Your pages, images, forms, publications and settings all stay.
• Ordering a subscription brings the site back within minutes, without any further action.

Ordering a subscription

Press Add subscription in the Subscription section, or click the banner in the builder. The order screen has two steps.

1. Choose products. There is one package, at €15 per month. The default billing cycle is annually: the price is quoted per month, and the invoice covers twelve of them at once.

Under the package you choose what to do about a domain:

Under that, Total shows what you'll pay, VAT included, and any discount. It changes along with the domain and the billing details.

2. Billing details. If you've ordered from us before, pick one of your existing sets of details and everything is filled in. Otherwise fill in your name, address and country. The country decides the VAT treatment, so it isn't optional.

Continue to payment takes you to the payment provider. If the domain is taken, or it has an extension we don't sell, the order screen tells you before anything is charged.

Paying during your trial never costs you the days you had left. If you order on day 2 of a 30-day trial, your paid period is extended so that it can never end earlier than the trial would have. You lose nothing by paying early.

Coming back from the payment screen

You get sent back to the same place whether you paid, cancelled, or let the payment expire. The portal checks what actually happened and tells you one of three things:

• Thank you for upgrading: the payment landed.
• Your payment was not completed: it failed, expired or was cancelled. Nothing has been charged and you can start again whenever you like.
• We have not received confirmation of your payment yet: the payment is real but still settling. Wait a moment and refresh the page. This is normal and usually resolves in seconds.

If you leave the payment screen without paying, nothing is lost: the order is on the website page as an open invoice under Invoices, with a Pay button.

If the payment could not be started at all, the order screen says You have an unfinished order, with the lines you chose, and two buttons: Pay order to try the payment again, or Start over to discard it. Filling in the form again replaces it too.

Renewals and invoices

Once you're subscribed, the Subscription section lists what you have: the product, the start date and the next due date. Below it, the Invoices section lists every invoice for this website: invoice number, date and due date, state and total. A paid invoice can be downloaded as a PDF; an open one has a Pay button.

Invoices for anything that isn't tied to one website (credits, for instance) are on your Profile page instead.

Common issues