Docs / Plans & billing / The 14-day trial

The 14-day trial

How the trial works day-by-day, what happens at expiry, and how to extend it.

Every new Servicio account starts in trialing status with 14 days of full Growth-equivalent access. No credit card required, no card-on-file. The trial is identical to the paid Growth experience — every feature is unlocked, you can add up to 10 seats and 1,000 clients, take real payments via Stripe, send quotes, run dunning, the works.

Day-by-day flow

  • Day 0: account created. billing_status = trialing, plan = trial, trial_ends_at = now + 14 days.
  • Days 1–14: a countdown banner sits at the top of every owner page ("12 days left on your trial. Choose plan").
  • Day 14: a daily cron at 04:00 UTC runs php artisan trials:expire. Any tenant whose trial_ends_at is in the past gets billing_status = frozen.
  • Frozen state: every owner request except /t/{slug}/billing/* redirects to the upgrade page. The data is intact and untouched — frozen is a paywall, not a wipe.
  • After picking a plan: billing_status flips to active, trial_ends_at is cleared, the banner disappears, and any seats / clients you added during the trial keep working as long as they fit under the chosen plan's caps.
Picking a lower-tier plan after the trial that you exceed during the trial is fine — your existing data is preserved, but you cannot add more of the over-cap resource until you either delete some or upgrade. Example: if you added 8 users during the trial and then chose Seedling (1-user cap), the existing 8 still work; you just cannot add a 9th.

Extending or restoring a trial

Trial length is configurable in config/plans.php (trial_days) and applies to new tenants. For an existing tenant, a super-admin can extend the trial from /admin/tenants/{slug}: set billing status back to trialing and enter the number of additional days. The trial date jumps to now + N days.

There is no automatic "ramp" between trial and paid — when the trial expires the tenant lands on the upgrade screen and stays there until they pick. We do not auto-charge, because we never asked for a card.

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