Billing and subscription access

Open Settings → Billing to see the Core subscription, invoices and add-ons. Managers can view the page; only an owner can start or change a subscription, open the Stripe billing portal, or change an add-on.

Billing currency

Subscription Checkout and add-on changes use the accounting currency locked when the practice is created: GBP for the United Kingdom, USD for the United States, and EUR for every other currently supported country. The upcoming invoice is shown in the currency reported by Stripe.

The approved monthly catalogue is:

• Core: £199 or $249, including two active locations. Each further active location is £79 or $99 a month, added when you create or restore it and removed when you archive it (prorated on the next invoice). Adding one needs an active subscription; the free trial counts. See Locations & operatories.
• AI assistant: £99 or $129.
• SmileLine Voice: £199 or $249, including three concurrent lines and one number per line. Additional lines are £49 or $69 each (up to 30), and extra numbers beyond the ones your lines include are £5 or $7 each.
• Power Dialer: £49 or $69 — the campaign calling workflow on its own, for practices using an external phone system. Included at no extra charge with SmileLine Voice.
• SEO & Ads: £199 or $249.
• AI voice agent (requires SmileLine Voice): £99 or $129 a month, which includes the first 300 AI minutes of each billing month; every minute beyond that is £0.35 or $0.45. Included minutes reset each month and don't roll over. Turning SmileLine Voice off turns the AI voice agent off with it. See AI receptionist.
• Call tracking (core, usage-billed): no add-on fee — tracking numbers are £5 or $7 each per month, answered tracked-call minutes are £0.05 or $0.07, and transcription is £0.02 or $0.03 per minute. See Call tracking.

The EUR subscription catalogue has not been approved yet. EUR practices see pricing as unavailable and cannot start Checkout or enable a paid add-on until SmileLine support confirms EUR pricing. SmileLine never falls back to GBP. If an existing subscription has a different currency, billing changes also stop so the practice is not charged in the wrong currency.

Stripe Tax is enabled on subscription Checkout. GBP catalogue prices are tax-inclusive; USD catalogue prices are tax-exclusive, so applicable tax is added by Stripe. Checkout can collect the customer's tax ID, and Stripe uses the billing details supplied there to calculate the final amount. When SmileLine creates the practice's Stripe customer record it pre-fills the practice name, the practice owner's email address and the billing address country from the practice's country, so Checkout shows that email and asks only for the card and billing address; customers created earlier keep the details they entered.

Your price book

Your prices are locked when your practice first subscribes. If Smileline raises its prices later, practices that already subscribed keep the catalogue they signed up on — Core, every add-on (including add-ons you enable later), extra locations, extra lines and numbers, and usage rates. New practices are offered the current catalogue. A practice that cancels and later resubscribes keeps its original price book too.

Free trial and complimentary accounts

The 14-day free trial runs once per practice. When you subscribe an additional practice on the same account, the billing page and the setup wizard say that your card is charged at Checkout rather than after a trial.

SmileLine can also set a practice up as complimentary: a normal subscription with a 100% discount, so invoices total nothing while everything on this page — add-ons, usage, invoices, the Stripe portal — keeps working exactly as it would on a paid account. When the arrangement ends, SmileLine removes the discount and the practice is priced normally from its next invoice. If no card is on file by then, Stripe asks for one through the billing portal.

Free plan for partner-created practices

A practice set up by a Smileline partner (a dental marketing agency working with the practice) starts on the free plan rather than a trial: every part of the product is available, no card is taken, and the practice may hold up to 100 patients. A strip at the top of every page shows how many of the 100 are used, with a Subscribe link for owners.

When the 100th patient is reached the strip turns red and the practice stops adding patients:

• Enquiries that keep arriving from your website forms, chat widget, ads, booking page, friend referrals and phone system are held, not lost. Each one is stored, counted on the red strip, and listed in Settings → Review queue as held.
• New patient in the app is disabled with a notice until you subscribe.
• Importing patients and connecting a practice-management system wait for a subscription.

Subscribe from Settings → Billing. There is no trial on top of the free plan, so the card is charged at Checkout. Within a few minutes of subscribing, every held enquiry is created automatically — a booking request becomes an enquiry with the requested time in its note for you to confirm by hand.

Payment retries, pauses and closure

A subscription marked Payment past due remains fully usable while Stripe retries the payment. SmileLine does not lock the practice merely because one payment attempt failed.

While Stripe reports Payment past due or Unpaid, owners and managers see a non-dismissible billing notice on every signed-in page. Owners can open the billing recovery action directly. Managers can see the same provider state but are prompted to ask an owner, because managers cannot change the SmileLine subscription. The notice disappears live after Stripe and SmileLine reconcile a resolved state.

An owner can still resume a provider-paused subscription. A Paused subscription restricts product access while it is paused, but it does not close the practice and does not start the deletion clock.

When Stripe confirms Cancelled or Unpaid, SmileLine immediately opens a 90-day practice-closure generation. An owner can also choose Close practice from this page and confirm the practice slug; this starts the same closure process and asks Stripe to cancel the current subscription.

Closure replaces the old commercial grace behavior immediately. Ordinary CRM work and public lead, widget, referral and booking surfaces stop as soon as the practice enters Closing. The following remain available:

• Settings → Billing, so the owner can recover the practice;
• account and security controls;
• data exports;
• automated privacy and retention cleanup; and
• background safety work needed to settle an already-started delivery, payment, refund or provider callback.

Retention settings themselves are frozen during Closing. Existing redaction, legal-hold and deletion work continues under its bounded lifecycle controls; Closing does not reopen ordinary Practice Settings.

The billing page shows the exact recovery deadline. Before it, recovery cancels that closure generation and restores active service. If the old subscription can still be restored, SmileLine removes its scheduled cancellation. If it has ended, recovery uses a new Checkout and becomes active only after Stripe confirms usable service. Stripe requires a minimum Checkout lifetime, so a new recovery Checkout cannot be opened during the final 31 minutes; an already-open session expires no later than the closure deadline.

At the deadline, the practice atomically enters Purging and recovery is disabled. A legal hold does not move or silently extend the deadline: the practice visibly remains in Purging with deletion marked as blocked until the hold is released. A hold blocks deletion only; it never keeps the Stripe subscription billing. SmileLine's independent purge sweep continues to cancel the connected subscription even if an older closure command failed or is no longer runnable.

Owners can see the Stripe-cancellation outcome in Settings → Billing and Settings → Account:

• Billing cancellation pending means the bounded Stripe backstop is still proving that every subscription has stopped.
• Billing stopped is shown only after the Stripe purge store has durably completed. A legal hold can still block data deletion after billing stops.
• Billing cancellation needs review means the attempt or deadline limit was reached without safe confirmation. SmileLine does not claim billing stopped; use Contact support so the provider state can be reviewed.

These statuses are visible only to a practice owner. They do not reopen the practice or make Purging reversible.

Add-on switches do not bypass this rule. An AI, Voice, Power Dialer, AI voice agent or SEO & Ads flag is effective only while Core access is available.

Turning the AI voice agent off (or turning SmileLine Voice off) takes effect immediately: no new AI calls start — calls routed to the AI take their fallback and queued AI call-backs wait, resuming if you turn it back on. A call already in progress finishes normally and its minutes are billed. The minute meter itself stays on your subscription — an idle meter costs nothing, and keeping it means minutes already used this month are always invoiced and your included allowance isn't reset by switching off and on.

The agent's Daily minutes budget (on the AI voice agent page) works the same way: it is a soft cap that stops new AI calls once the day's minutes are spent, while a call already running finishes and is billed in full. The This period figure on the AI voice agent card counts the minutes the invoice will carry; minutes from a call whose usage record is still awaiting review are shown separately as awaiting review until they are reconciled.

Changing Voice

Use Concurrent lines on the SmileLine Voice card to change capacity, then click Update lines. Three is the minimum and 30 the maximum.

Each line includes one number, and a practice can hold at most 15 billable numbers beyond what its lines include — so lowering the line count is refused while the practice holds more numbers than the lower count allows. The message says how many to release; do that on Phone numbers, then update the lines again.

Enabling Voice while the standalone Power Dialer add-on is on removes the Power Dialer from the subscription in the same change — the workflow is included in Voice, and it is never billed twice. The Power Dialer row then reads Included in Voice.

Disabling Voice removes the base, line and number charges immediately. It does not release the practice's numbers: every Voice line is held free for 60 days and callers who dial one hear a line-changed notice and can leave a voicemail. Turn Voice back on inside those 60 days and each of them returns as it was. Call-tracking numbers are part of the core plan, so they keep answering and keep being billed throughout. See Phone numbers.

What happens after renewal

Renewing restores new CRM and public product work. SmileLine does not replay sequence steps, reminders, scheduled reports or other scheduled work that fell due while access was stopped.

If an inbox snooze timer fell due during that stopped period, the conversation stays snoozed after renewal. Reopen it manually when you are ready to continue.

Campaigns that were paused because access ended stay paused after renewal. An owner or manager must review and resume each campaign deliberately; this avoids an old promotion starting unexpectedly as soon as payment is restored.

Provider-safe billing changes

Checkout, portal and add-on requests use a durable request identity. SmileLine allows only one active subscription Checkout generation for a practice, including when two tabs send different request references. Repeating an action after a timeout retrieves the original open Checkout session instead of creating another customer, session or subscription. A new Checkout generation is allowed only after Stripe positively proves the old session expired and reconciliation proves there is no usable or repairable subscription.

The one-time trial is consumed only after Stripe proves that the resulting subscription actually carries the trial. Abandoning or failing Checkout does not consume it.

Subscription recovery follows the provider state:

• Payment past due opens Stripe's billing portal so the owner can settle the existing subscription rather than starting another one.
• Paused uses a dedicated resume action. Resume begins a new billing period immediately, does not prorate the paused period, and does not create a practice-closure generation.
• Unpaid or Cancelled opens a closure generation and can begin a deadline-bound recovery Checkout after provider reconciliation.

If SmileLine finds ambiguous or multiple Stripe subscriptions, it freezes Checkout, add-on, discount and trial mutations while leaving the overview and billing portal available for recovery. Stripe events are durably recorded before projection, and stale billing authorities are reconciled on a bounded schedule even when a webhook was missed.

The onboarding return and billing page can also request an immediate, read-only Stripe reconciliation. This updates only SmileLine's fenced local projection; it never creates or changes a Stripe subscription. Returning to onboarding therefore recovers a completed Checkout before another Checkout can be offered.

One billing change applies at a time per practice, so a change requested while another is still finishing is queued rather than refused. The practice sees a note that it is queued; it then applies on its own, in the order requested, as soon as the change ahead of it completes. There is no need to try again.

Deterministic billing failures stop immediately. Provider or infrastructure failures retry a bounded number of times and then wait for platform review; they do not retry forever. Every request and terminal success, failure or manual-review outcome has separate audit evidence.