Trigger: Stripe events, plan changes, failed payments, refund requests. Owner: Jonny Allum. Policy anchors: POL-09 §3.2 (fail-open), POL-12.
1. The setup (what runs itself)
- Platform billing: Stripe subscriptions — Solo £29 / Team £89 / Business £199 / Scale £499 + the Founding £69 lifetime-lock offer; 14-day trials, no card up front; plan caps (seats/sites/AI actions); AI-action top-up packs; self-serve customer portal for upgrades, downgrades and cancellation.
- Tenant money: invoices with Stripe pay-online links, storefront/ booking card checkout, payments auto-recorded by webhook, recurring invoices on anchored schedules, overdue chase cron.
- Enforcement fails open: a Stripe outage or webhook gap never locks a paying tenant out. The cost of fail-open is reconciliation — §3.
2. Manual interventions
| Situation | Action |
|---|---|
| Trial expiring, engaged tenant | Personal email before expiry — convert or extend once (14 days max extension, note in CRM) |
| Failed payment (dunning) | Stripe retries run first; after final failure, personal email with portal link; 14 days grace before restricting; restriction ≠ deletion (data held per POL-10) |
| Refund request | Honour ≤14 days after first charge no-questions; otherwise pro-rata judgement, recorded with reason |
| Plan-cap overage (seats/sites/AI actions) | The product enforces caps; if someone hits them hard, that's a sales conversation, not a punishment |
| Chargeback | Respond with evidence from Stripe + audit trail; never fight an honest dispute |
3. Monthly reconciliation (first Monday, with SOP-06 check)
- ☐Stripe active subscriptions ↔ active tenants match (no ghosts either way)
- ☐Webhook delivery log: zero unhandled failures; replay any missed events
- ☐Founding-cohort pricing locks intact after any price changes
- ☐MRR, trial-conversion and churn noted (one line each — trend beats detail)
4. Price changes
New pricing applies to new customers; existing customers get 30 days' written notice; Founding lifetime locks are never broken — that promise is load-bearing for the brand.
5. VAT/tax
Platform invoices carry the correct VAT treatment for the business's registration status; when the threshold or registration changes, Stripe tax settings and invoice footers are updated the same week, and the accountant confirms treatment in writing (filed 6 years — POL-10).