Sort out a locked feature, a free-tier cap, a seat or invite that didn't stick, and checkout or subscription state that looks wrong — including what self-heals vs. what needs support.
How-to guide: Teams, seats & billing.
Locked features & upgrade prompts
"A feature is locked / shows an upgrade prompt." That feature needs a higher plan for your role. CoverGuard gates two ways:
- Tier — how much you pay (Free → Individual → Professional → Team).
- Persona relevance — you never see features irrelevant to your role.
"Why does the same plan cost a different amount on another page?" Not a mistake — the price depends on who the plan is for. Home Buyer Pro and Home Seller Pro are $4.99/month, while the professional Agent Starter plan is $29/month. All three are the same Individual tier, and homeowners simply pay a homeowner price. The one usage difference: the homeowner plans include 5 full Records per calendar month (Agent Starter includes 25).
"My Record stopped showing insurance costs, carriers, or the valuation." You have used your monthly Record allowance. Every paid plan except Team has one, and it is a real limit:
| Plan | Full Records per calendar month |
|---|---|
| Home Buyer Pro / Home Seller Pro | 5 |
| Agent Starter | 25 |
| Professional | 100 |
| Team | Unlimited |
Each distinct property you pull counts once — re-opening a property you already pulled this month is always free and stays a full Record. Past your allowance, a new property shows the free preview (risk + insurability) until the allowance resets on the 1st. The Record tells you when this is why a section is missing, and offers to unlock that one property outright for a one-time price if you need it before your allowance resets — see Buying a single Record.
If you bought Agent Starter you get its 25 even if your account is set up as a homeowner — you always get the allowance of the plan you actually purchased, not the one your role implies.
They are not identical in what they surface, because the second gate above still applies: tier decides what you can unlock, persona decides what is relevant to you. Client management is Individual-tier, for example, but only for professional roles — so it appears on the Agent Starter card and not on a homeowner's. Each card lists exactly what that plan gives your role. You always see your own price on /pricing and in any upgrade prompt, and that is the price you're charged.
Commonly gated (paid) features: insurance estimates, client management, quote requests, property comparison, analytics, branded/PDF reports, deals pipeline, carrier-exit & renewal alerts, Integration Hub, custom Agent creation, and the Developer API (Team-tier). Check exactly what your role gets at each tier on /pricing (it renders a live persona × tier matrix). Each audience has its own link, and the site now uses it for you: reach pricing from your own solution page — For Agents, For Lenders, CRE, Brokers & Agencies — and both that page's pricing button and the Pricing link in the top nav open your audience's plans directly. You can also address it by hand: add ?for= and your role, e.g. /pricing?for=residential for real estate agents or ?for=lender for mortgage — handy for sharing that exact view with a colleague. If you ever land on the wrong one, the audience buttons at the top of the page switch it.
"I hit a free-tier cap." Free tier is 1 property search and 5 Advisor questions, lifetime, plus 1 saved property at a time. Upgrade to lift them. These caps are always enforced for free users. (Saving is still a free feature — you just keep one saved home at a time; unsaving frees the slot, and any homes saved before a downgrade stay accessible.)
Seats & teams
"My invite didn't give the person a seat." You're likely at your seat limit (Free 1 / Individual 2 / Professional 5 / Team per-seat). Buy more seats on /teams or remove a member. The invite path blocks new seats at the limit.
"A teammate lost access after I downgraded." Expected. The owner always keeps a seat; remaining seats go to the earliest-joined active members first. Members beyond the new limit drop to free and show an "Over seat limit" badge until you free a seat or upgrade.
"A member isn't inheriting my plan." Inheritance is capped at the owner's paid seats and to active membership. Confirm they're an active member within the seat limit, and that your subscription is entitled.
Checkout & subscription state
"Every plan says 'Request access' instead of letting me buy." (Same on the Teams page, where the seat calculator shows the price you'll pay once your account is open.) CoverGuard is in private preview, so accounts are opened by invitation rather than by self-serve checkout. When that is switched on, the pricing page says so at the top and every plan's button becomes Request access, which takes you to a short form — our team follows up to open your account. The plans and prices you see are what you'll get once it is open; nothing is charged at that point. If you already have an invitation, use the link in your invitation email. When private preview ends, the same cards return to ordinary checkout with no action from you.
"I switched to Annual but some prices didn't change." Annual billing isn't available on every plan yet. A plan that doesn't have it says so directly on its card — "Billed monthly — annual billing isn't available on this plan yet" — and the toggle reads Save up to 20% rather than a flat 20% whenever that's the case. The price you see is always the price you'll be charged; nothing on the page advertises a discount that checkout wouldn't apply.
"I clicked Contact sales — what happens now?" It opens a short request form rather than your email client, so nothing depends on you having one set up. Tell us about your team and we'll follow up. Two different situations lead here: Enterprise plans are sold by conversation by design, and occasionally a plan that's normally self-serve routes here too while its checkout is being set up.
"I can't check out / upgrade buttons are disabled." Payments may be temporarily disabled platform-wide (an incident kill-switch) — upgrade CTAs disable themselves and checkout returns a "payments disabled" error; existing subscriptions keep working. Otherwise it's usually a card/Stripe issue — retry or use the billing portal.
"My renewal failed — did I lose access?" Not immediately. A past-due subscription stays entitled during Stripe's dunning retries (you'll see a "past due" warning). Access ends only if retries exhaust and Stripe cancels.
"I paid but have no access" / "I have access but see no subscription." Subscription state self-heals: a daily reconcile runs in both directions (local↔Stripe), including recovering a Stripe subscription that never got written locally. If it doesn't resolve within a day, contact support@coverguard.io with your account email.
"I canceled but still have access" (or vice-versa)." Stripe events can arrive out of order; CoverGuard drops stale events so a delayed "active" can't resurrect a cancellation. Same-second races converge to canceled. Give it a few minutes; the reconcile backstops it.
"Downgrading — what happens to my saved properties?" They stay accessible on the free tier. Downgrades take effect at the next billing cycle.
Billing exemptions
CoverGuard staff (a verified @coverguard.io address) and the monitoring account bypass paywalls and are treated as Team — that's internal and doesn't apply to customers. Their Subscription tab shows a complimentary Team plan with no billing controls, because there is no billing account behind it.
"I'm CoverGuard staff and I'm being asked to upgrade." You shouldn't be. Sign out and back in first — the app resolves your plan once per page load, so a tab left open from before your account was set up keeps the old answer. If it persists, the staff exemption is a release flag (FEATURE_COVERGUARD_ADMIN_BILLING_EXEMPT) and it may be turned off for this deployment.