Upgrades start on the pricing page and finish in a Stripe checkout. Everything after that — switching plans, updating your card, cancelling, downloading receipts — lives in one place: the Stripe customer portal.
Alculator billing runs on Stripe end to end. You pick a plan and a billing interval on the pricing page, pay on a Stripe-hosted checkout, and manage everything afterwards in the Stripe customer portal — your card details never touch Alculator's servers. This article walks the whole lifecycle: upgrading, choosing monthly versus annual, changing or cancelling a plan, and what happens when a card stops working.
To upgrade: go to the pricing page, pick Monthly or Annual with the toggle, and click your plan — you'll land in a Stripe checkout and your new plan activates as soon as payment completes. To manage an existing subscription: open your Account page in the app and click Manage Subscription, which opens the Stripe portal for plan switches, card updates, cancellation, and receipts.
Every self-serve upgrade starts on the pricing page. Choose a plan — which one fits which kind of business is the subject of Which Plan Do I Need?, and the full grid of limits and prices lives in Plan Limits — then click its button. What happens next depends on whether you're signed in:
When payment completes, Stripe sends you back to the pricing page with a welcome banner, and your new plan is active immediately — no waiting, no manual provisioning. The pricing page also recognizes where you already stand: your current plan's card is marked "Current Plan," and plans below it are dimmed. Upgrade prompts inside the app deep-link to the same page with the relevant plan highlighted, so wherever you start, you finish in the same checkout.
One plan is different: Enterprise has no checkout button at all. It's a contact-us conversation with invoiced billing, set up by hand.
Above the plan cards sits a Monthly / Annual toggle. It changes one thing: how often Stripe charges you. Monthly bills every month; annual bills once a year, at a discount — the toggle shows each plan's per-month equivalent and yearly total as you flip it, and the exact figures are in Plan Limits.
The features are identical on both intervals; there is no functional difference between monthly Pro and annual Pro. Pick annual when you know you're staying, monthly when you're still deciding — and if you start monthly and change your mind later, you can switch intervals from the Stripe portal without going through checkout again.
Once you're on a paid plan, the pricing page stops being your billing surface. Instead, open your Account page in the app (at /app/account, or via the sidebar) and look under Plan & Usage for the Manage Subscription button. Clicking it opens the Stripe customer portal — a secure page run by Stripe, tied to your subscription. From there you can:
Two notes on who sees what. On Starter, the Account page shows an Upgrade Plan button alongside Manage Subscription, pointing back to the pricing page; on the top tiers there's nothing above you to upgrade to, so only the portal button appears. And if you're a team member on someone else's workspace, you won't see billing controls at all — the workspace owner owns the subscription, and members ride on it without paying. How seats and invites work is covered in Teams.
Cards expire, banks decline, limits get hit. When a renewal charge fails, Alculator does not cut you off:
The fix is the portal: Account → Manage Subscription → update your card. The next retry then succeeds and the whole episode ends quietly. Only if every retry fails and Stripe finally cancels the subscription does your account move down to the Free plan. Your brands and data are kept — what changes at Free-plan limits is laid out in Plan Limits.
The banner and email arrive on the first failed charge, days before anything terminal happens. Updating the card the day you see them means you never find out what the downgrade path looks like.
Receipts live in the Stripe customer portal, alongside everything else: Account → Manage Subscription, then look for the invoice history on the portal page. Every charge on your subscription is listed there, viewable and downloadable — useful at expense-report time, since Alculator itself never stores a copy of your payment records. If your accountant needs a paper trail, the portal is the source of truth.
Compare the plans, flip the annual toggle, and upgrade in one checkout.
See Plans & Pricing →