How add-on billing and free trials work

Add-ons are the extra features you switch on next to your plan: Experiences, custom design, the waitlist, custom fields, Reserve with Google, tracking, multiple locations and the full API, among others. Some are free and some are paid, and the paid ones start with a free trial that becomes a paid subscription by itself if you keep them. This guide explains exactly what happens and when, so nothing on your invoice comes as a surprise.

Which add-ons cost money

Open Menu → Settings & add-ons and you will see every feature listed. A paid one carries a paid-feature icon and shows its price before you activate it. Free add-ons carry no price and no trial, so there is nothing to watch.

Two rules apply to every paid add-on:

• They need a paid plan. On the Free plan a paid add-on shows Requires a paid plan and cannot be activated. Choose a plan first at Menu → Settings & add-ons → Account → Billing.
• The All-Access plan includes them all. If you are on it, add-ons show Included in your All-Access plan and switching one on adds nothing to your subscription. Messages are the exception: SMS booking confirmations and SMS reminders are billed per message sent, so they are charged on top of the bundle exactly as they are on every other plan.

The free trial

The first time you activate a paid add-on, you get a 30 day free trial of it. Before you activate, the add-on card tells you so in the words Try free for 30 days, and the confirmation dialog spells out what follows: when the free trial ends you will be charged for the feature together with your other subscriptions, and disabling the feature cancels that subscription.

Once it is running, the card shows Free trial ends with the date. That date is the one that matters, so it is worth noting it somewhere.

The trial is per add-on, not per account, so activating a second add-on later gives that one its own 30 days.

What happens when the trial ends

Nothing needs to be done by you, which is exactly why it catches people out. When the 30 days are up, the add-on stays switched on and is added to your subscription as a paid feature.

You then receive an email with the subject Subscription updated telling you which features have been added and reminding you that you can remove one by disabling it in your settings. No email is sent if a promotional discount is still running on your booking subscription, or if our team has set up a special arrangement on your account, so in those cases the change happens quietly. That email arrives after the change, not before it, and there is no reminder in the days leading up to the end of the trial. If you want a warning, put the trial end date in your own calendar when you activate.

A converted trial does not change your plan or your booking limit. An automatic plan upgrade is a separate thing that happens when your booking volume passes your plan’s limit, covered in how to upgrade or downgrade your plan.

How the charge lands on your invoice

An add-on is not billed separately. It is added as a line on the subscription you already have, on the same billing cycle, so it appears on your normal Resos invoice next to your plan.

What that means in practice depends on how you pay:

• Paying monthly: the add-on is charged from the day the trial ends, and the part of the current month is settled on your next monthly invoice.
• Paying yearly: an add-on added mid-year is invoiced straight away for the remainder of your year, so you see a charge at the moment the trial ends rather than at your renewal date. That invoice covers the add-on from the day the trial ends to your existing renewal date, prorated, not a further full year. It is the reason a yearly customer can see an unexpected invoice about a month after activating an add-on.

How to cancel before you are charged

Disable the add-on any time during the trial and you are never billed for it.

1. Go to Menu → Settings & add-ons.
2. Find the add-on in the list and open it.
3. Click More to expand the add-on, then Disable, and confirm.

The dialog tells you what happens: the feature stops working immediately, and any subscription for it is canceled right away. This is the same route you use to cancel an add-on you are already paying for.

Two consequences to be aware of:

• Disabling takes effect at once, and there is no refund for the unused part of the period. If you have already been charged for a month or a year, canceling stops the next charge rather than crediting the current one. Time the change accordingly.
• Switching an add-on off and on again does not restart the trial. If you switch it back on while the original 30 days are still running, you get the remainder of that trial. If you have already paid for the add-on once, re-activating it starts billing straight away with no new trial.

Longer or special trials

We are sometimes asked for a longer trial, most often for Experiences. Those are arranged individually by our support team rather than being a setting you can turn on yourself, so write to us if you want one and tell us what you would like to try. Anything agreed that way is set up on your account by us.

Please note that a longer trial arranged with support is a commercial arrangement, not an automatic feature, so the terms are whatever we agree with you in writing.

If you were charged and did not expect it

Get in touch. Tell us which add-on it is and when you activated it, and we will look at the dates on your account and explain exactly what was charged and why. If something went wrong at our end we will put it right.

You can reach us at hi@resos.com. For how plans themselves are priced and counted, see how Resos pricing works.