Auto-renew & Expiry
Paid MultiCartAPI plans renew automatically each month through PayPal. This page explains exactly what happens at renewal, what a failed payment means for your account, and how the spend-down period works when you cancel.
How auto-renewal works
All paid plans (Basic through Pro) are PayPal recurring subscriptions. PayPal charges your payment method on the monthly anniversary of your subscription start date — no action is needed from you.
When a payment succeeds:
- PayPal confirms the charge and fires a renewal event to MultiCartAPI.
- Your monthly credit quota is reset to your plan's full allocation — unused credits from the previous month are not carried forward.
- Your billing period end date is extended by one month.
- You receive a payment receipt email with a PDF invoice attached.
Credits reset on every renewal
Each successful renewal replaces your credit balance with a fresh full-quota grant. If you had leftover credits at the end of a cycle, they are not stacked — the counter resets to zero used and your plan's full quota available.
This applies to a standard same-plan renewal. If you have a pending downgrade, the renewal does not reset your balance — your existing credits are preserved into the new, lower-quota cycle. See How Credits Work for the carry-over rules.
Plan credit quotas
| Plan | Price (USD/mo) | Credits per cycle |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free | 500 — one-time, never refills |
| Basic | $15 | 10,000 |
| Essential | $65 | 125,000 |
| Plus | $125 | 250,000 |
| Super | $250 | 500,000 |
| Prime | $500 | 1,000,000 |
| Ultra | $1,250 | 2,500,000 |
| Pro | $2,500 | 5,000,000 |
Contact-sales tiers (Elite) are excluded from this self-serve renewal table — they are set up outside the normal PayPal flow. See Plans & Pricing for details.
The free Starter plan
The Starter plan is a one-time lifetime grant of 500 credits. It has no billing period and never auto-renews. Unlike paid plans, Starter credits are granted once at signup and are not refilled each month — when they are spent, they are gone unless you upgrade to a paid plan.
Starter credits do not refill
There is no monthly reset on the free plan. Once your 500 credits are used, you will need to upgrade to continue scraping. See How Credits Work for how credits are consumed.
What happens when a payment fails
If PayPal cannot charge your payment method on the renewal date:
- Your subscription status moves to past due.
- You receive an email — "Action needed: your MultiCartAPI payment failed" — prompting you to update your payment method in PayPal.
- PayPal's own retry logic will attempt the charge again on its standard dunning schedule.
- Your account access is not immediately cut off; the subscription remains past due while PayPal retries.
If PayPal exhausts its retries and cancels the subscription, your account will follow the cancellation spend-down path described below, and eventually revert to the Starter plan.
Update your payment method in PayPal
MCA does not store your card details — payment is managed entirely by PayPal. To update your payment method, log in to your PayPal account and update the payment source attached to your MultiCartAPI subscription.
Cancellation and the spend-down period
When you cancel a paid subscription (see Cancel your plan for the steps), your access is not cut off immediately.
In short: you keep everything you paid for until the end of the billing period you already paid for — then the account reverts to the free Starter plan with whatever credits remain from the original one-time grant (if any).
No credit refund on cancellation
Unused credits at the end of the spend-down period are not refunded or carried into the Starter balance. The Starter plan credit balance reflects only the original 500-credit signup grant.
Subscription status reference
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| active | Subscription is current; credits and access are available normally. |
| past_due | A renewal payment failed. PayPal is retrying; access is not yet cut off. |
| canceled | Cancellation confirmed. Spend-down period in effect until period end. |
| expired | Period end has passed after cancellation; plan has reverted to Starter. |