The trial now starts inside the product, at email verification, and Stripe
grants none at all: checkout creates a subscription that bills immediately.
Verifying an address is what buys the seven days, which is also the cheapest
abuse control there is.
An unexpired trial is treated as an entitlement the account already holds, so a
Stripe sync can add access but never retracts a trial that has not run out. That
matters most for the abandoned checkout: the resulting incomplete subscription
carries no trial_end, and writing it through would have erased the days the
account still had and locked it out.
Unpaid accounts are bounded by what they can cost us rather than by what they
can do: one workspace, one project, 3 GiB of direct uploads. YouTube imports,
share links, guests, comments and approvals stay unlimited, because those are
the parts worth trying and they cost nothing. isPaidTier() is the new seam;
hasBillingAccess() answers a different question now that access no longer
implies a card.
Signup CTAs, the pricing card, the comparison pages, the terms and the refund
policy all said the trial converts to a paid plan by itself. It no longer does,
so they say what happens instead. Settings and a banner name both dates that
matter: when the trial ends, and the fifteen days after that during which
nothing is deleted.
/admin/growth compares the two funnels on signup to paid within a fixed 30 day
window, not trial to paid. Dropping the card requirement multiplies trials, so
the old ratio can fall while more people actually pay, and reading it that way
would retire the change for the wrong reason.
Stripe flagged the account under Visa 1.5.1.2 and Mastercard 5.5/5.6:
the location stated on the site has to match the Stripe account. The
legal pages only said "Wyoming, United States" and the footer said
nothing at all. Both now carry the same address Stripe has on file.
Section 13 let us suspend or terminate an account "with or without cause and
with or without notice". It is common boilerplate, but for a product whose pitch
is that you can hold your own footage and leave whenever you want, it reads as a
standing right to close a paying customer for no reason.
It replaces that with four defined grounds: material breach of the Terms with a
ten day cure period, no cure period for a repeated breach of the same
obligation; unlawful use, infringement of a third party's rights, or a security
risk, where we may act immediately; fees unpaid fourteen days past due after
notice; and legal compulsion.
Defined grounds need their counterparts, so the clause also carries what we owe
in return: suspension while we investigate comes with a duty to say why and to
restore access if the suspicion does not hold, terminating for any other reason
or discontinuing the Service or a plan takes thirty days notice and a refund of
prepaid unused fees, and User Content stays available for export for thirty days
after termination.
Section 6 had the same flavour and is softened to match, from removing content
"at our sole discretion" to where we reasonably determine it violates the Terms.
That refund promise contradicted Section 5 and the Refund Policy, which both say
every fee is non-refundable including unused months. The general rule exists to
stop buyer's remorse refunds, not to let us keep a prepaid year we cut short, so
Section 13 now overrides them explicitly and the Refund Policy states the same
exception rather than leaving the two pages to disagree.
yusufipk