Billing and workspace plans

Each workspace — a brand or client space — carries its own plan, managed at Settings → Billing in two tabs: Plan & billing (your plan, renewal schedule, and payment) and Usage & overages (the meters and caps this article explains). The workspace owner makes billing changes; managers can view the page read-only, and other roles don’t see it at all.

Your subscription invoice covers exactly two things: the plan, and any extra usage you’ve explicitly turned on. Storefront sale fees never appear on it — those are collected per sale, at checkout, through your connected Stripe account. Prices and plan comparisons live on the pricing page; this article covers how the machinery behaves.

Every plan starts with a 14-day trial with full access to everything in the plan you pick. A card is required at checkout, nothing is charged until the trial ends, and canceling during the trial keeps your access through the last trial day — you’re never charged.

Two details worth knowing. First, the trial starts at checkout, after you’ve connected an Instagram account — so you never burn trial days on setup. Second, the trial belongs to the Instagram account: each connected account gets one, ever. Reconnecting the same account later — even in a new workspace — won’t restart the clock; the checkout simply becomes a paid start and says so plainly.

Plans include a monthly allowance of Active Contacts — the one number that scales with how much you actually use Ravela. An Active Contact is anyone you interact with in a billing month, counted once per connected account no matter how many messages, automations, or purchases follow. Followers who never message you cost nothing.

“Interact” means any conversation touch: a DM in either direction, a flow run, a manual reply from your inbox, an accepted email, a delivered asset. The count resets at the start of each calendar month.

You’ll never discover a limit by surprise. As usage climbs, the workspace owner gets an alert by email and in-app at 70%, 90%, and 100% of the allowance — each one fires once per month.

At the limit, one specific thing pauses: automations stop starting conversations with new contacts — people who haven’t been active yet this month. Everything else keeps working:

Extra usage is off by default — the hard stop above is the default behavior. If you’d rather never miss a lead, turn on paid overage in the Usage tab: you set the cap, either as a number of extra contacts or as a fixed dollar budget, and acknowledge the terms (the acceptance is recorded). Usage never bills past your cap, and you can change or turn it off anytime.

While overage accrues, the meter shows the running count and the estimated cost in real time. After the billing month closes, accrued overage is billed as its own automatic invoice — separate from the subscription, never mid-month.

Plans from Growth up include a monthly email send allowance (the pricing page lists the numbers). It works exactly like contacts: alerts as you approach the line, a hard stop at the allowance by default, and its own opt-in overage with a cap you set — by sends or by budget.

At the cap with no overage enabled, email steps skip rather than queue — visibly, on the email node’s Skipped branch and in email analytics — and resume when the month resets. Active Contacts and email sends are the only metered dimensions in Ravela: form responses are unmetered, and everything else (seats, accounts, storage, forms) is a fixed plan limit, not a meter.

Upgrades take effect immediately — you get the new plan’s features and allowances right away, with a prorated charge for the remainder of the cycle. Moving from monthly to annual billing counts as an upgrade and works the same way. Downgrades are gentler: they take effect at renewal, you keep your current plan until then (no credit for unused time), and a scheduled downgrade can be undone with one click before it lands. During a trial, any switch is immediate and free.

Canceling follows the same no-drama rule: access continues to the end of what you’ve paid for (or the end of the trial), the status shows Canceling, and you can reactivate anytime before the period ends. No contracts, no cancellation calls.

A failed renewal doesn’t pull the plug. The billing page shows Past due, payment is retried automatically, and your automations keep running while it resolves — the only immediate restriction is that plan changes wait until the payment is settled. The fix is the Manage billing button, which opens the Stripe billing portal to update your card (it’s also where invoices and receipts live).

If the payment stays unresolved through the retry schedule, the workspace’s automations pause until a payment succeeds — you can still sign in and your data is untouched. Separately from billing, a workspace suspended for policy reasons shows a clear “Workspace Suspended” screen: you stay signed in, you can switch to another workspace if you have one, and support is one click away.