What happens if a payment fails

If a monthly charge does not go through, your server does not disappear and nothing happens to it that day. What follows is a fixed schedule. This article gives you the dates, what your players see, and exactly how to get your server back.

1. The schedule

The clock starts at the moment the first charge failed — not at your renewal date, and not at the next midnight.

• Day 0 to day 7. Stripe retries your card automatically. Your server keeps running the whole time.
• Day 7. Still unpaid: the server is stopped. Your world and your join address are held for you.
• Day 21. Still unpaid: the server is terminated on or before this day. A final backup of your world is taken and kept for 30 days.

Paying at any point before day 21 puts everything back on its own. You do not have to ask anyone to un-suspend it.

You never have to count the days yourself. While a payment is failing, Rebetchi Manage at manage.rebetchi.com shows a banner with the exact dates — on the Billing page, and on every page of the affected server's console.

2. Day 0 to day 7 — retries, and the server keeps running

Stripe retries the card on its own schedule (Stripe calls this Smart Retries) for up to 7 days. Nothing about the server changes during that week. It stays up, your players can join, and your save is untouched. The only failure so far is a card.

3. Day 7 — the server is suspended

If the charge is still unpaid on day 7, we stop the server. The check runs once an hour, so the stop happens within about an hour of that mark.

What suspension actually means:

• Players who are connected get a 30-second warning in chat, then the server goes offline. The message tells them the server is going offline until its owner restores service and that their world is saved. It does not mention money — it goes to everyone on the server, not only to you.
• The world is saved before the server stops.
• Your save data is intact and your join address is held, so nobody has to learn a new address later.
• You cannot start it again yourself. The Start control is unavailable on a suspended server, and the machine refuses a start as well. Paying is what lifts it.

4. Day 21 — the server is terminated

If it is still unpaid on day 21, the server is terminated. A final backup of your world is taken and uploaded first, and then the server and its address are released.

• The final backup is kept for 30 days from termination.
• Your server name and join address are held for the same 30 days, so you can take them back.
• After 30 days, both are released. That is not reversible — not by you, and not by support.

5. How to get your server back

1. Sign in at manage.rebetchi.com and open Billing.
2. Press Update payment method in the banner, or Manage billing further down the page. Both open Stripe, where you update the card we charge and read past invoices. We never see or store your card details.
3. Add or fix the card.

When the payment goes through, Stripe tells us within seconds. The failure clock is cleared, and if the server was suspended a resume is sent to it automatically. Same server, same world, same join address, and nothing for you to press in the panel.

Two things worth knowing:

• If you had stopped the server yourself before the payment failed, it stays stopped. Paying only undoes our hold, not yours — start it from the console when you want it back.
• There is no control anywhere that forces an immediate retry. If you have updated the card and nothing has changed a day later, email support@rebetchi.com and we will look at the invoice. There is no self-serve control for this yet.

6. If it was already terminated

Inside the 30 days, buy the server again — from rebetchi.com, or from New server in the panel. Checkout offers your terminated server as something to restore, and choosing it keeps the same name, the same join address, your roster and your backup history instead of starting a fresh server. Your final backup is in that server's backup list, and restoring it puts the world back; see Backups and restoring your world for how a restore works.

If you are near the 30-day mark or unsure what you have left, email support@rebetchi.com before it passes. After the release there is nothing left to restore.

7. Two things this is not

• Suspension is not deletion. At no point in the first 21 days is your world deleted, and after termination a copy of it is kept for another 30 days.
• This is not the same as cancelling. If you meant to stop paying, cancelling is a different process with different dates, and there is no cancel control in the panel yet — see Refunds and cancelling.