Billing and plans

Plans are a fixed price for a fixed allowance; nothing is metered. Prices include tax. The prices are on the pricing page, the allowances on Plans and limits; this page is about the mechanics.

Choosing a plan

Three plans are sold online: Starter, Growth and Portfolio. A new customer creates an account first (Create your account); the welcome recommends a plan, and the setup screen offers it or another, monthly or annual; Buy a plan walks through it. In an existing workspace, Settings, Plan shows the current plan and those three, each priced at the workspace’s site count, monthly or annual. Enterprise is an annual contract, agreed with us rather than bought online.

An owner or admin chooses a plan and the billing period; the card is entered on Stripe’s checkout page, never in the workspace. Checkout returns to the setup screen (/setup), which says what happens next: if the site is already verified, the first site audit has started; if not, verifying it starts the audit; with no site yet, adding one comes first. The poll on your topics and the runs start only on a verified site. There is no trial of paid plans; without a plan the workspace shows what Vercatus can already read on the first domain.

Monthly or annual

Every plan sold online can be billed monthly or annually. Annual billing costs ten months’ price for twelve months (two months free), paid in advance, and covers the plan, its additional sites and extra seats. A monthly plan can be cancelled any time; an annual plan runs to the end of its year. Refunds are as the terms state, and one of them is described under Refund in the first 14 days.

The invoice

Prices include VAT, GST and sales tax, so the list price is what you pay; a business that enters its VAT number at checkout pays the same price, with no VAT added. Payment is taken by Stripe as merchant of record through its Link service: the receipt and the invoice come from Link and the statement shows LINK.COM* before Vercatus. Manage billing on the Plan page opens Stripe’s portal for the card, past invoices and cancellation.

Sites beyond the included ones

Portfolio includes five sites and holds up to 25; Growth includes one and holds up to three; Starter is for one site. Adding a site beyond the included ones changes the subscription’s “additional site” quantity the moment the site is added, prorated for the rest of the period; the Plan page shows the next invoice’s amount. A plan that is full says so, and the Plan page switches to the larger one in place, prorated. Above 25 sites is Enterprise.

Seats

Owners, admins and analysts each take a seat; viewers are free. Starter includes three seats, Growth five, Portfolio fifteen and Enterprise fifty. Extra seats are added from Settings, Members & seats or the Plan page, as a quantity on the same subscription: an added seat is charged for the rest of the period on the next invoice, a removed one credited. Switching plan carries the seats in use beyond the new plan’s included ones. Enterprise seats are set by the contract. See Team, seats and roles.

Allowances and the billing date

Poll answers, full runs and change runs per site reset monthly on the billing day, not on the first of the month. On an annual plan they still reset every month, on the same day of the month the plan started; the year’s allowance is not granted at once. The run dialog and Settings, Usage say how much is left and when it resets.

Failed payments

If a charge fails, Stripe retries the card over the following days and the Plan page shows that the payment failed. While Stripe retries, the plan stays in force: the poll and runs continue. If no retry succeeds, Stripe ends the subscription or marks it unpaid; either way the poll stops and no run starts, and everything already measured stays visible and exportable, as described under cancellation. Paying an unpaid subscription restores the plan.

Pausing, changing plan and cancelling

Pausing instead

A plan can be paused for one, two or three months from the Plan page: nothing is charged, the workspace stays readable, the history stays, and the poll, runs, the access watch and the schedule wait. A verdict whose window spans the pause records it as an interruption of the poll. It resumes on its own on the date, or earlier with Resume now; the next invoice is on the usual date. A paused workspace is not deleted.

Changing plan

Settings, Plan switches between Starter, Growth and Portfolio in place, prorated. On a plan with fewer topics, the poll measures the site’s longest-standing topics up to the new allowance; pause or retire the ones you no longer want measured, and the others take their place. A Starter site gets one baseline crawl of up to the plan’s pages when the site is verified, read without the model and outside the monthly allowance, so its change run and the access watch have something to compare against.

Refund in the first 14 days

Within 14 days of the first payment, and while no run has started, the Plan page shows Cancel and refund. It cancels the subscription and refunds what you have paid in full; the audit log records it. A run starts when the domain is verified, so a domain that cannot be verified is the usual case. Once a run has started, or after the 14 days, cancelling works as below.

Cancelling

Cancel from Manage billing (or from the Link account). The plan stays active to the end of the paid period (the month, or the year on an annual plan) and does not renew. After that the workspace is read-only: topics, results, plays, runs and history stay visible for ninety days, and the export holds the workspace’s sites, runs, findings, verified fixes, tracked questions, the answers behind Answer Share, goals, audit log and usage. No run starts, and choosing a plan again continues where it left off. The terms state the deletion that follows.