How Billing Works
Subscription and billing are still being built. This page describes how billing will work, but the functionality is not available yet. Currently no organization is being charged and all data is to be considered work-in-progress. Should you be interested in using rat.gd, please contact gdpr-labs@outlook.com.
Every organization in ROPA 2.0 holds a license with an end date. That single date decides what you can see and do: while it lies in the future your organization works normally, and once it has passed the organization moves through a fixed sequence of stages — read-only access, then blocked, and finally deletion — unless it is reactivated along the way.
Subscriptions, invoices and receipts are issued by GDPR Labs, the company behind ROPA. Payments are processed through an specialized secure payment firm. GDPR-LABS never sees or stores your card details.
The whole lifecycle is drawn in the Billing schema. This page walks through it stage by stage; the Billing FAQ answers the most common questions.
Billing procedures
1. Free trial
A newly created organization gets a 90-day trial with full ROPA management: every feature is unlocked, you can create and edit as much as you like, and no card is required to start.
Administrators see an information banner counting down the days that remain, with a link to the billing page. Other members see nothing.
If the trial ends without a subscription, the organization goes straight to "blocked" — there is no read-only period in between. Subscribe before the countdown reaches zero if you want to keep working without interruption.
2. Subscribing
The billing page lives under Organization settings → Billing, and only administrators can act on it.
- Choose monthly or yearly. The yearly plan is the cheaper of the two per month; the current prices are shown on the page itself.
- You are taken to a secure payment page to enter your payment details.
- After paying you return to ROPA. The license usually updates within a few seconds — reload the page if the status has not changed yet.
3. Invoicing
Listed prices are excluding VAT. The correct rate for your country is added at checkout.
Organization details, like address, VAT identification number and billing email address, are extracted from the application (Organization settings page).
Business customers in the EU may opt in to the reverse-charge VAT rule at checkout where applicable. When reverse charge applies, no VAT is added to the invoice amount, and the invoice states this explicitly. In this case, the customer is responsible for self-account for VAT with their own tax authority.
4. Active subscription
While the subscription is active the organization works exactly as during the trial, and the license end date moves forward on every renewal — every month or every year, depending on the plan you chose. No subscription banner is shown.
If renewal has been switched off — you cancelled, or a payment failed — administrators see a warning banner until the paid period runs out. Fixing the payment or subscribing again clears it.
5. The courtesy period
When a subscription is not renewed — a payment failed and could not be recovered, or you cancelled and the paid period has ended — the organization enters a courtesy period of up to 30 days.
During the courtesy period your organization is read-only: every member can still open the dashboard, browse activities, partners and contracts, and public ROPA links keep working, but nothing can be created, edited or deleted. Every member sees a banner explaining why.
Renewing the subscription at any point in these 30 days puts the organization back to active, with nothing lost.
6. Organization blocked
An organization reaches this stage in one of two ways:
- the trial ended without a subscription, or
- the courtesy period ended without a renewal.
From then on, and for up to 120 days, the organization is blocked: it can no longer be opened in ROPA. Instead of your dashboard you get a message explaining that the license lapsed:
- administrators can still reach the billing page to reactivate, and can download the organization's ROPA — the record of processing activities is available for download and nothing else;
- other members are informed the organization is blocked and asked to contact an administrator;
- public ROPA links and PDF exports for the organization stop working and return an error to visitors.
Reactivating — subscribing again — brings the whole organization back exactly as it was.
7. Deletion
If the organization is not reactivated within the 120 days, it is deleted permanently, together with all of its activities, partners, contracts, templates and settings. Deletion cannot be undone and GDPR Labs keeps no copy.
Administrators receive a warning by email 2 weeks before the deadline.
If you know you are letting a license go, export the organization while you still can, so you keep a copy of the record outside the application. See Import / Export. The export stays available while the organization is blocked, but not after deletion.
License stages at a glance
The banner at the top of the application tells you where your organization stands.
| Stage | How you get there | Lasts | Who sees the banner | Your records |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trial | Organization created | Up to 90 days | Administrators | Full management |
| Active | Subscription purchased or renewed | While the subscription renews | Nobody (administrators, if renewal is off) | Full management |
| Courtesy period | Subscription not renewed | Up to 30 days | Every member | Read only |
| Blocked | Trial or courtesy period ended | Up to 120 days | Every member (blocking message) | Download only |
| Deleted | 120 days without reactivation | — | — | Deleted |
Administrators get a Manage billing button in the banner; other members are asked to contact an administrator. The banner can be dismissed for the rest of your browser session, and it reappears on your next visit.