Billing emails
Proofbell emails you about your bill at eight moments: your subscription starting, your plan changing, an invoice being paid, a payment failing, your subscription ending, a tracking number being bought, a tracking number being released, and your included answered calls running out. Nothing about a call is ever in one of these — no caller numbers, no recordings, no transcripts — the same rule that governs every payload leaving the platform.
The eight moments
Subscription started
Sent once, the first time a subscription starts actually granting access. Not the moment the
subscription row is created: Stripe creates it default_incomplete, before the card
is entered, specifically so a declined card is never welcomed to a plan it never paid for. Someone
who reaches the card form and closes the tab leaves a real, unpaid subscription behind and is not
emailed about it.
Plan changed
Sent when the plan on the subscription actually changes. An upgrade takes effect immediately and the email says so; a downgrade is scheduled for the end of the paid period and the email names the date it takes effect, and that you keep everything the old plan includes until then.
A scheduled downgrade is announced when it takes effect, not when you book it. Booking a downgrade for next month sends nothing today. The subscription itself still carries your current plan until the schedule fires, so there is nothing yet to tell you that would not be describing something that has not happened. The email arrives on the day the change is actually in force.
Invoice paid (your receipt)
Sent when Stripe marks an invoice paid, with the amount, the description and links to the invoice. A £0.00 invoice — a fully-covered proration, or a 100% coupon — is not receipted; "payment received — £0.00" would raise a question rather than answer one.
The receipt links to Stripe's hosted invoice page and its PDF. It does not attach a file. Stripe produces both, and they carry the VAT calculation, the tax registration and the sequential invoice number — the copy that counts. Reproducing that as an attachment would create a second document that can disagree with the one that does. View the invoice opens Stripe's hosted page; where Stripe has also given us a PDF link, that is offered too. Both open in a new tab, and either way the invoice is always listed on your own Invoices screen as well.
Payment failed
Sent for each failed payment attempt — not once per invoice — so you hear about the second and third dunning attempt as well as the first, without being told about the same attempt twice. It leads with the fact that matters most: your tracking is still running and nothing has been switched off. Stripe retries automatically for a fortnight before a subscription is at risk, and the email says when the next attempt is, or that there is not one and the card needs updating now. It never states a decline reason we would have to guess at, and it never names a card or its last four digits — we do not hold them, and inventing a detail on a message asking you to enter payment details is the exact pattern a phishing email uses.
Subscription cancelled
Sent when the subscription ends, however it ended. Says, in order, when tracking actually stops (immediately, or at the end of the period you already paid for), that your call records, reports and attribution data are unaffected, that your tracking numbers go back to the carrier and cannot be reclaimed, and that recordings and transcripts are kept for a while and then removed. It does not name the deletion date — that is a separate, later email (below), because two emails naming two different dates for the same event is how someone keeps audio they meant to export and loses it anyway.
Number purchased
Sent when a tracking number is bought, naming both the number and the account it belongs to — an agency admin managing several clients needs to know whose number it is from the subject line alone, since the person who clicks buy is not always the person who pays. States the monthly carrier cost where one applies, or that the number counts against the plan's included allowance, and restates that carrier numbers are chargeable for at least 90 days from purchase, including if you release the number sooner.
Number released
Sent when a tracking number is released, naming the number, the account it belonged to and the date it stopped. It says plainly that the number's monthly charge stops with it — anything already billed for the current period still stands — and that calls to that number will no longer reach you, so it is worth taking off your website, your ads, printed material and any listing you keep. Your existing call records and reports for that number are unchanged and stay in the dashboard.
This one exists for the release nobody meant to make. A second admin tidying an inventory list, or an agency clearing down a client account, otherwise leaves no trace in the inbox of the person whose van, poster or Google listing still prints that number — and the next sign of it is a customer who dialled and got nowhere. If a release was a mistake, reply to the email and tell us: a number sits in quarantine for 90 days before it goes back to the carrier.
Usage warnings: 80%, 100%, and once when overage starts
Up to three messages a billing month, one per threshold crossed, never all three: at 80% of the included answered calls, when the full allowance is reached, and once when the first chargeable extra call happens. Passing straight from 40% to past the allowance sends only the overage message — not three messages in the same minute telling you about thresholds you are already well past.
- 80% says nothing is being charged yet — it exists so the figure on your next invoice is not a surprise.
- 100% says tracking carries on as normal and further answered calls this month are charged as extras.
- Overage is not phrased as a warning, because by the time it arrives the money is already being spent — a warning that arrives after the fact is just a late apology. It states the per-call overage rate and points at plan comparison, because the useful question at that point is whether a bigger plan would now be cheaper than the extras.
A plan with no published overage rate says so rather than pretending the extra calls are free — if that ever looks wrong, the email itself invites you to reply and have it checked.
These are sent by an hourly check, and it is not switched on yet. Whether one of the three is due is decided by a pass that runs every hour, rather than inside call handling — on purpose, so an email provider's outage can never hold up a call being answered. An hour is the most you would wait: the thresholds are crossed by call volume rather than by the clock. That hourly schedule is installed but not yet enabled on our production server, so the emailed nudge at 80%, 100% and overage is the part that is not live today. The allowance figures on the Usage screen are correct and current either way, and are the place to look until it is.
You will never get the same warning twice for the same month, whichever way it is sent: each of the three is claimed against your account and billing period before it goes out, so a retry, a restart or a second server produces one email rather than two.
Who gets them
Every billing email goes to the account's admins with a verified email address: the account's own admins, an agency's partner admins — because a client account often has no admin of its own and the agency holds the card — and anyone given the billing-only role, which exists precisely so a finance contact can get the receipts without being handed the rest of the account. Each recipient gets their own message; nobody's address appears in a copy sent to somebody else. An unverified address is excluded rather than risked, on the same reasoning as a typo email address anywhere else: a receipt sent to a typo is a receipt sent to a stranger.
If you are an agency: one daily digest, not one email per client
The three allowance emails are the exception, and they work differently for agencies. An agency managing thirty clients would otherwise receive up to ninety allowance emails a month, each one naming a different client's plan — and the ninetieth is not read.
So the 80%, 100% and overage emails go to each client account's own admins, and your agency's admins get a single digest instead: at most one a day, only on days when something actually changed, listing every client that passed one of those points since the last digest with its calls used, its allowance, and — where a client is already paying for extras — what an extra call costs them. It links to your Clients screen.
Nothing else changes: number purchases, failed payments, receipts, plan changes and cancellations still reach your agency's admins per account, because those are the ones where the agency is usually the party that has to act.
If you are a single business rather than an agency — or an agency with one client account — there is no digest and nothing changes: the allowance emails arrive as they always have.
An account with no verified admin address is not silently skipped forever — nothing is sent this time, and the next billing event tries again.
Sent once, never twice
Each of these is claimed against the specific thing it describes — a Stripe invoice id, a subscription id, a billing period, the tracking number itself — before it is sent, so a Stripe retry, a redelivered webhook, or the same check running on both of Proofbell's application instances at once all produce exactly one email rather than a flood of them. The agency digest is claimed the same way against the day it covers, so a client that passes a threshold after the morning's digest has gone out appears in the next one rather than triggering a second — while that client's own admins are told within the hour either way.
What each plan includes, and what going over an allowance costs, is on What each plan includes. What the Usage and Invoices screens themselves show, and why the usage figure is an estimate until the period is reconciled, is on Usage and invoices.