Troubleshooting: Billing, plans & paywalls

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:

1. Tier — how much you pay. Every upgrade prompt names a plan from your own pricing page: an agent sees Agent Starter, Agent Pro and Agent Team; a lender sees Lender Starter, Lender Pro and Lender Team; CRE and insurance brokers see their own CRE … and Carrier … plans the same way; a home buyer or seller sees Home Buyer Pro or Home Seller Pro. A prompt that says "a paid plan" means any paid plan unlocks it. (In October 2026 the plans were renamed: the agent plans Professional and Brokerage are now Agent Pro and Agent Team; the $79 CRE Starter, Lender Starter and Carrier Starter plans are now CRE Pro, Lender Pro and Carrier Pro, and CRE Professional is now CRE Team. The Starter name now belongs to the new $29 plan for every professional. If you were already subscribed, your plan, your price and everything it unlocks are unchanged — only its name moved.)
2. 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 Buyer 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:

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. It doesn't offer the one-time purchase to a subscriber — your plan already includes Records, so there's nothing to buy (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 Buyer-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, 1 property Record 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.)

"Another property only shows the band — I thought I had a free Record." You've already spent it. Your one free Record goes to the first property whose Record you open while signed in, and it stays yours forever — reopen that property as often as you like at no cost. There's no way to move it to a different property; every other address shows the insurability band and the public property details until you upgrade, or until you buy that one property's Record outright.

"My free Record shows a cost range instead of the estimate panel." That's the free Record working as intended, not a failure. The range is a real modeled spread for the required cover on that property, and the card states its confidence. A paid plan replaces it with the full estimate: every coverage line priced separately, the dwelling coverage and deductible the premium was priced against, the mitigation levers that move it, and a cross-check against premiums real owners report paying nearby.

"Half the sections on my free Record have a padlock." Working as intended, and shown rather than hidden on purpose. A free Record carries the score, the full risk profile and the cost range; the analysis built on top of those — cost by peril, carriers, the coverage gate, required coverage, placement difficulty, cost burden, the FAIR Plan model, the full insurability reasoning and the ways to lower the premium — is what a paid plan adds. Each locked section says what is inside it, so you can judge whether it's worth upgrading for before you do. Sending a quote request needs a plan too.

"Where my home's risk-adjusted value should be, there's a padlock." Same answer, one level down. The risk-adjusted value isn't a section of its own — it sits beside the cost as a figure — so on a free Record that slot carries the lock and a line saying what's behind it instead of the number. If you're selling, this is usually the figure you came for: it's what your home is worth once a buyer's insurance picture is priced in, and it's included from the first paid plan up.

Seats & teams

"My invite didn't give the person a seat." Free, Starter, Pro and the homeowner plans are individual plans — one seat, just you — so inviting a teammate needs the per-seat Team plan. On Team, you're likely at your seat limit: add seats from Account → Settings → Subscription → Change plan, or remove a member. The invite path blocks new seats at the limit.

"The billing portal won't let me go above 10 seats (or below 3)." Expected. Self-serve Team seats run from 3 to 10; the Subscription tab shows that range. For 11 or more, choose "Talk to us about Enterprise" on the Subscription tab and we'll set it up with you. On an individual plan the portal offers no seat count at all — those plans are one seat.

"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.

"The plan said Get started, but sign-up asked me for an invitation." We sometimes show the pricing pages with their ordinary buttons while CoverGuard is still in private preview — for example while we try out a change to how plans are presented. Opening an account still needs an invitation, so the sign-up page tells you so and offers Request access there. Use it: your request reaches the same team, and once your account is open you can come back to pricing and pick the plan again.

"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 send it; you'll see a confirmation right away, and our sales team follows up within one business day about the plan you chose. The Talk to sales entries on the Help Center and Contact pages open the same form. 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 (paid plans on the pricing page read Payments paused, even before you sign in) 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.

"My Subscription tab names a different plan than I expected." It names the plan the way the pricing page does. A Home Buyer Pro or Home Seller Pro subscription keeps that name even if your role has since changed, because that's the plan you pay for — and a $29 Starter plan is shown as Starter (for example Agent Starter). A team plan with 11 or more seats, or one CoverGuard provides, is shown as Enterprise rather than Team. Your payment emails use the same name.

"I don't see the Move up to Pro card." It appears only on a Starter plan you pay for yourself. It's hidden while the plan is set to cancel (choose Reactivate subscription first), while a renewal payment is failing (update your card first), during a free year that came with a Record purchase, on a homeowner plan, on a plan your team or CoverGuard provides, and while payments are paused. You can still move up from any card on the pricing page.

"Downgrading — what happens to my saved properties?" They stay accessible on the free tier. A downgrade takes effect straight away, and Stripe prorates the difference: you see the credit or charge before you confirm. Cancelling is different: it takes effect at the end of the period you've paid for.

"Can I get a refund?" If you're not happy with your first paid subscription, email support@coverguard.io within 30 days of its first payment for a full refund (the 30-day money-back guarantee). It covers the first payment of a subscription, once per customer, not renewals or one-time Record purchases. The full terms are in Section 7 of the Terms of Service.

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.