Failed Payments & Account Recovery
Cards fail. A renewal that does not collect does not cancel your account, but it does stop generation until the invoice is settled, and if it stays unpaid long enough the subscription is cancelled.
This page covers what you see when a payment fails, what happens to your credits, how to get back in, and what changes afterwards.
For ordinary balance questions see Credits & Billing. For plan changes see Updating Your Plan.
What happens when a payment fails
An unpaid invoice blocks anything that spends credits. That includes starting a generation, rendering, and Rush Agent edits.
You will see one of two messages, and they mean different things:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Insufficient credits | Your balance is empty. Buy a Top-Up Credits balance, enable Pay-As-You-Go, or wait for your renewal |
| Outstanding balance | You have an unpaid invoice. Your credit balance is irrelevant until it is settled |
A full credit balance does not unblock an unpaid invoice. This surprises people: your account can show 6,000 of 6,000 credits and still refuse to generate. The credits are yours, but access is gated on payment, not on balance. Settle the invoice and they become spendable again.
You also cannot start a new subscription or change plan while an invoice is outstanding. Checkout is refused rather than letting you subscribe around the debt.
Your grace period
Access is not cut the moment a payment fails. VidRush gates access on the end of your last paid period plus a 24-hour grace window, so a card that fails on renewal day gives you a day to fix it before anything stops.
Inside those 24 hours, retrying the payment successfully leaves everything exactly as it was.
After 14 days, the subscription is cancelled
A daily job runs at 03:00 UTC and cancels any subscription whose oldest unpaid invoice is 14 days old or more.
This is a cancellation, not a deletion. Your projects, brand profiles, and custom avatars are untouched. But:
- Plan credits stop being granted
- Pay-As-You-Go becomes unavailable
- A Top-Up Credits balance is frozen, not destroyed. You have six months to come back and reclaim it in full
The 14-day clock counts from your own oldest unpaid invoice, so settling the oldest one is what matters if you have more than one.
How to settle
- Open Settings, then Billing & Subscription.
- Find the outstanding invoice and pay it.
- Access and credits return once the payment is confirmed.
If your card is the problem, update the payment method first and then retry. Retrying against a card that has already failed three times will usually fail again.
What changes after you pay
Two things do not go back to exactly how they were.
Paying more than 24 hours late moves your billing date. If a renewal invoice goes unpaid for more than 24 hours and is then paid, your billing cycle is re-anchored to the day you paid, and your credit expiry moves with it. So a subscription that used to renew on the 3rd of the month and was settled on the 11th now renews on the 11th.
Recoveries inside the 24-hour window keep your original dates. Your access comes back either way, and the date change does not gate it.
Credits withheld during the unpaid stretch are not granted retroactively. You are not credited for the period you could not generate in. If the gap was long, this is worth raising with support rather than assuming it will reconcile itself.
If a payment is written off
If support writes off an invoice rather than collecting it, the outstanding-balance block clears as soon as no other unpaid debt remains on the account. A written-off invoice does not grant credits. It removes the block, nothing more.
Team accounts
An owner’s unpaid invoice blocks the whole team. Everyone spending from that credit pool is blocked, not just the account owner. Team members will see the outstanding-balance message even though they have no way to pay the invoice.
Only the owner can settle it. If you are a team member seeing this, the owner is who to talk to. See Workspaces & Team Management.
If the block does not clear after you have paid
Occasionally an account keeps showing the outstanding-balance message after a successful payment, most often when the payment went through after several failed attempts on the same invoice.
If Stripe shows your invoice as paid and VidRush still blocks you, contact support. A hard refresh will not fix it. Support can clear the flag directly, usually within a working day.
When you get in touch, include:
- The email on your account
- The invoice number and the date it was paid
- A note that earlier attempts on the same invoice failed
That last detail is the one that speeds it up, because it points straight at the cause.
Good to know
- Nothing is deleted. Failed payments block access and eventually cancel a subscription. They never remove projects, brand profiles, custom avatars, or a top-up balance.
- Blocked generations cost nothing. A generation that is refused for an outstanding balance never enters the pipeline and never draws down credits. See Credits & Billing.
- Pausing is not the same as failing. A paused subscription deliberately stops new charges and still lets you spend a top-up balance. An unpaid invoice blocks every source. See Top-Up Credits.
- Pay-As-You-Go survives a cancelled subscription. If you cancel and resubscribe, your PAYG setting reattaches to the new subscription rather than needing to be turned on again.
- A card that has failed on one account is remembered. Cards with unsettled VidRush debt are blocked from being attached to a different account, so opening a new account is not a route around an unpaid invoice.
- Cancelled inside a paid period is not the same as unpaid. If you cancel but have already paid through the end of the period, you keep full access and full spending until that date.