What happens if a charge fails?

The first thing that happens is that we'll send you an email about it, which you can reply to if anything has gone wrong. We get those replies in support and can take the conversation from there!

The system automatically retries the charge one more time 24 hours after the first try fails. If the second try succeeds, the flag is lifted and you're back to business as usual. If not, the flag remains. You can clear the flag by updating your card info or retrying the charges.

Pending this, we place a flag on your account that hides the graph images (but does not deactivate your goals) until the failed charge succeeds or is dismissed. While the flag is active, you can't create new goals, restart old goals, or see your graph images... but you'll still get reminders and can add data, and you can still derail again once per goal. The mobile apps don't work when your account is in this state, but you can still add data via the web version, the API, integrations and the email bot.

If you derail on a goal while the flag is active, that goal will go into an inactive state where no more data can be added, and it won't derail again after that point. This is a per-goal setting, so if one goal freezes, others will still be active until they derail too.

If you can't figure out why a charge would have failed, you can send us an email in support to help us get to the bottom of what's happening! It's worth just giving a retry a shot first, though, just in case there was a temporary issue.

Note that if you use honey money and your balance goes negative, the same thing will happen, but it will self-resolve as soon as your honey money top-up is processed.

Keywords: payment method failure, the injudiciously-named deadbeat flag, frozen goals, decline, card declined, payment method declined, card failed, graph hidden