What happens when your balance runs out: a 3-day grace period

We shipped a small but important change to how DeskBoot behaves when your account balance runs out. Nothing here changes what you pay for or the underlying billing model — this is about what happens after the meter has already stopped and your account is on empty.

The short version

• Running sessions still auto-stop within a minute of balance hitting zero. That behavior hasn't changed.
• You now have a 3-day grace period to top up before any session is actually terminated.
• We'll email you once a day during that window with a clear message about where you stand.
• If your saved card is being auto-declined (a common reason accounts silently drift into the red), that email now says so explicitly — with the brand and last-4 — so you know what to fix.
• After 3 days of no top-up, we terminate the remaining stopped sessions and wipe the disks. Storage charges stop growing. A final email confirms it.

Why we changed this

Before this week, if your balance hit zero and your saved card stopped working (expired, cancelled, or the bank revoked the mandate — all common), the system was retrying your card every 4 hours in the background but never telling you it was failing. Storage kept accruing on stopped sessions, and a handful of accounts drifted quietly into small negative balances over weeks.

That's not the right shape. The core promise of per-second billing is "no surprises" — and silent retries of a dead card don't fit that promise.

What you'll see

If your balance ever crosses zero:

1. Running sessions stop within a minute (unchanged).
2. First email lands the next day: "Your balance is at $X. Add funds by [date] or we'll terminate your sessions."
3. If your saved card is being declined, that email calls it out specifically ("we tried your Visa ending 4081 and the bank rejected the authorization").
4. Same email arrives daily until you top up.
5. After 3 days: session disks wiped, final email confirms it.

Adding funds at any point during the window resets everything back to normal — the grace clock only starts if you go negative again.

Practical implications

• If you park data on stopped sessions, this doesn't change anything about the storage charge itself — that still ticks. But now if you forget to top up, you get a real warning instead of a stale ledger.
• If your card gets reissued, add the new card as soon as you can. The email tells you when a specific card starts declining so you know it's the card, not the site.
• If you never launched a session, none of this applies to you — the grace-period emails only fire for users with sessions that could actually be terminated.

Where to check your card

Dashboard → Billing → Payment methods. Delete the failing card, add a new one. Auto top-up will pick up the new default on its next attempt.

Questions on any of this? Reply to any email from us, use the contact form, or check the FAQ.