Billing FAQ

Onbrief bills in advance. A monthly workspace is charged on the day of the month it was created, for the month ahead. An annual workspace is charged once, on its anniversary, for the year ahead.

The day of the month never drifts. A workspace created on the 31st is billed on the last day of shorter months and returns to the 31st afterwards.

Invoices are emailed to every workspace owner on the day the charge is raised, and every invoice stays available on the billing page for as long as the workspace exists.

If your agency needs invoices sent somewhere other than the owners — a shared inbox, or the person who actually reconciles them — add that address as a billing contact on the billing page. Billing contacts receive invoices and nothing else; they cannot sign in to the workspace.

A seat is one person who can sign in to your workspace. Seats are counted, not licences: the same person cannot occupy two seats, and a seat cannot be shared between two people.

Clients do not take seats. Anyone you invite to a client space as a client is a guest. Guests can open the spaces they were invited to, read updates, download files and respond to approvals, and none of that costs anything. An agency can have more guests than it has seats, and most do.

Deactivating a person keeps their history and their name on everything they touched, but frees the seat immediately. That is the difference between deactivating and removing: removing erases the person from the workspace, deactivating keeps the record and stops the billing.

A seat that is added or removed mid-cycle is prorated by the number of days left in the current billing cycle, so a workspace only ever pays for the days a seat was actually available to it. Nothing waits for the next invoice, and nothing is rounded up to a whole month.

The formula is the same in both directions:

amount = seat price for the period
         x  (days remaining in the period / total days in the period)

Days remaining are counted from the day the change takes effect up to but not including the first day of the next period. The seat price used is the one on your current plan, before any annual discount is applied to the workspace as a whole.

Adding a seat raises a charge for the remaining days. On a monthly workspace that charge is added to the next invoice rather than taken immediately, so a workspace that adds and removes people through the month settles once.

Removing a seat stops it immediately, and the identical day-count is used to put a money value on the unused remainder of the cycle for that seat — the days your agency paid for in advance and will not now use. That value is what any adjustment for the removed seat is worked out from; this page sets out how the figure is reached and does not decide whether an adjustment is made.

Cancelling the whole subscription mid-cycle is day-counted the same way, seat by seat, across every seat on the workspace.

Worked example, on a monthly plan at $24 a seat, in a 30-day period: a seat that comes off with 10 days remaining is valued at 24 x (10 / 30) = $8.00. Two such seats come to $16.00, and so on. An annual workspace is day-counted against the twelve-month term the same way, so a seat that comes off after four months is valued at eight twelfths of that seat's annual price.

Where an adjustment is made, it appears on the invoice as its own line, with the date the change took effect and the number of days it was calculated over.

Every invoice has three parts, in this order:

1. The subscription line — the plan, the number of seats it covers, and the period it covers.
2. Adjustments — one line per seat change during the period, each with the date the change took effect and the number of days it was calculated over.
3. The total — the subscription line plus adjustments, plus tax where your agency's country requires it.

An adjustment line can be positive or negative, so an invoice total can be smaller than the subscription line and occasionally zero. A zero invoice is still issued and still emailed, because it is the record of the adjustment.

The billing page shows the same three parts for every past invoice and lets you download any of them as a PDF.

If a charge is declined, Onbrief retries it three times over the following seven days and emails every workspace owner each time. The workspace keeps working throughout.

After the third failure the workspace moves to a read-only state: everyone can still sign in and read, client spaces stay open to guests, and nothing is deleted — but new updates, uploads and approvals are paused until the balance is settled.

Updating the card on the billing page retries the charge straight away, and a workspace comes out of read-only within a minute of the charge succeeding.

Nothing is deleted because of a failed payment. A workspace in read-only keeps every file and every client space for ninety days, and support will extend that if your agency asks.