Automatic plan changes

Issue Mint reviews every subscribed account once a night and moves the plan when the list has moved. Upgrades wait 7 days over the limit, except for a list that jumps well past it, which moves the same night. Downgrades wait until the end of the billing period you have already paid for.

Both directions are deliberately slow, and neither one interrupts anything. Your issues keep sending and new readers keep signing up throughout, whichever way the plan is about to move. The five plans covers the ceilings that decide all of this.

The nightly review

Once a night, Issue Mint counts the active subscribers on each subscribed account and compares that total against the plan the account is on.

The review runs after the day’s statistics have settled, so the figure it works from is the same one your billing page shows rather than a half-finished count. It then does one of four things: nothing, start a clock, execute a move that a clock has run down, or clear a clock because the list has come back. Every account with a live subscription goes through this, and an account with no subscription is skipped, having no plan to move.

Moving up after a week over the limit

An account that stays above its plan’s subscriber ceiling for 7 days in a row is moved to the plan that covers it.

The days must be consecutive. One good week on Hacker News, or a conference talk that lands you eight hundred readers who then plateau, does not change your bill if the list settles back under the ceiling in the meantime. The count starts on the first night the total is over and resets the moment it is not.

The warning email goes out on that first night, not on the night of the move. It names your current subscriber total, the ceiling you have passed, the plan you are moving to and the date it will happen, so nobody finds out their bill changed by reading a receipt. If the list drops back under before that date arrives, the move is abandoned and no second email is needed.

Moving up the same night when a list jumps

A list more than 15 per cent past its plan’s ceiling is not a spike, so Issue Mint moves the plan in that night’s run rather than waiting.

The threshold exists because waiting a week on a list that has grown by a third only delays the same outcome. Where this is the first night over the limit, the warning email still goes out in the same run and before the confirmation, so the sequence you read is the same as the slower path even though the two arrive together. An upgrade is prorated: Stripe charges the difference for the days left in the current period, and the full new price applies from the next invoice.

Moving down after a period spent under the limit

A downgrade needs the whole billing period. Issue Mint moves an account down only when it has been under a smaller plan’s ceiling since before the current period began, and the move takes effect at renewal.

That is later than it could be, on purpose. A mid-period downgrade would mean taking away headroom you have already paid for and crediting time you have already used, which is worse for the customer than waiting a fortnight. When the downgrade is scheduled you get an email naming the plan and the renewal date, and nothing changes before it.

The decision is checked again on the day. A list that has grown back since the downgrade was scheduled cancels it and stays where it is, and any night on which the list goes over the current ceiling clears a pending downgrade outright.

What never changes when a plan moves

Sending, signups and everything about your newsletter carry on exactly as they were.

Being over your plan limit does not pause a send, does not close your signup forms and does not put a notice on your website. The only things a plan change touches are the price on your next invoice and the ceiling in your usage meter. If a move cannot be completed at Stripe for any reason, the account stays on its current plan and the clock keeps running until it can, rather than the subscription being left in an odd state. What appears on your invoices covers the paper side of a move.

The record kept of each change

Issue Mint writes a row for every movement up or down: the plan before, the plan after, the reason, and the monthly price on each side.

Five reasons exist, and they separate what happened rather than only what changed. Growth and shrink are the nightly job’s own moves. A plan change is one you made yourself in the billing portal. A new subscription is the first paid plan on an account, and a cancellation is recorded as a move to no plan at all. Each is written once, even if Stripe delivers the same event twice, so a retried webhook cannot double-count a move that happened once.

That record is ours rather than a page you browse: what you see is the email at the time and the invoices afterwards. It exists so that any question about a bill has an answer that does not depend on anybody’s memory, and so movement across the plan ladder can be seen rather than inferred.