Payments and invoices

Stripe handles the money. Choosing a plan sends you to a checkout page Stripe hosts, and managing a card afterwards sends you to a billing portal Stripe hosts, so card details are never typed into Issue Mint and never stored here.

What Issue Mint keeps is the part it needs: which plan you are on, the promotion code you used, and a record of every movement between plans. Prices for each plan are on the pricing page.

Paying for a plan

Choose a plan on the billing page and Issue Mint hands you to Stripe’s checkout page for it. Paying there sends you back to the billing page, and the subscription itself arrives from Stripe moments later.

A plan smaller than your current list is refused before checkout opens, with the name of the plan that covers you. If you are on a trial when you subscribe, the remaining days are kept and the first payment falls on the day the trial would have ended. Nothing about your newsletter changes when a payment succeeds, other than the ceilings coming off: your issues, lists and settings are exactly where you left them.

Promotion codes

The promotion code field is on Stripe’s checkout page, and it is always available.

Codes come from us rather than from a public list. Once a code is applied, Issue Mint reads it back from the completed checkout and shows it on your billing page, so you can see months later which code you used. A discount applies for however long the code itself says, and Stripe is where its terms live, not here.

What the billing portal handles

The billing portal covers your card, your billing details, your invoices, swapping plan and cancelling.

It is reached from “Manage payment and invoices” on the billing page, it is Stripe’s own page, and it returns you to Issue Mint when you are done. Issue Mint has no cancel button of its own and no card form of its own, deliberately: one place to change payment details is easier to trust than two. Cancelling a subscription sets out what happens after you use that part of it.

Your next invoice, and the ones you have paid

The billing page shows what Stripe intends to charge next and the date it will happen, alongside your twelve most recent paid invoices with a PDF for each.

Both of those are read from Stripe when the page loads, so they appear a moment after the rest of it. If Stripe is unreachable, the plan cards and your usage meter still render and those two sections come back empty rather than taking the page down with them, which is the behaviour you want on the one page you would visit to work out whether the problem is billing.

When a payment fails

A failed subscription payment gets you an email naming the amount, and a banner on the dashboard that cannot be dismissed. Stripe then retries over the following few days.

Nothing stops during those retries. Issues send, signups keep working, and the dashboard stays fully writable, because a bank holding a payment for review is not a reason to interrupt somebody’s newsletter. Updating your card in the portal ends it, and a successful retry clears the banner on its own. A failed one-off charge does not trigger any of this, since only a subscription invoice puts the service at risk.

If the retries run out

A subscription that Stripe eventually gives up on ends, and the account goes read-only in the same way an expired trial does.

Your public website stays up, your archive stays published, your list is untouched and every export still works. What stops is sending, new signups and changes. Subscribing again lifts all of it immediately, and what expiry changes is the detailed list of what read-only does and does not block.

What Issue Mint does not do with money

Issue Mint bills you monthly, in US dollars, by card. That is the whole of it.

There is no annual price, no invoicing or bank transfer arrangement, and no charge per email or per newsletter. Issue Mint also takes no part in money that flows towards you: sponsorship is arranged and invoiced between you and your sponsor, so nothing you earn from an issue passes through us and nothing you earn changes what you pay.