How Billing and Subscriptions Work

Read this article to learn how we charge you for productive subscriptions/licenses. Both monthly and annual plans are explained here.

Updated over a week ago

Free trial

First, you start a free, 14-day trial. During the trial, you can add your credit card at any time but you will not be billed until the trial expires.

If no credit card has been added during the trial, your access will be blocked after the trial expires and you will have to add the credit card to log in and continue working.

Subscription start

Your subscription starts after the free trial has expired and a valid credit card has been added.

Productive subscriptions can be either monthly or annual:

  • Monthly: billed in monthly intervals (every month one bill)

  • Annual: billed annually (one bill per year)

You are billed for the interval period upfront and the amount is calculated from your current seat count. If you add seats during the interval period, you will be charged extra.

What are "Seats" in your plan?

The number of seats indicates the number of employees or contractors from your company that will use Productive. For example, if your company employs 10 full-time employees and five contractors, you will need 15 seats in total.

A person who owns a seat in Productive can track time in the app and is therefore considered a paid account.

You can also add your clients to the app (more on that here) but you will not be charged for their seats.

Monthly plan

Use case:

Let's say you have 10 seats, and you initially pay $200 upfront for the month (10 seats x $20 each). Later in the same month, you decide to add one more seat.

In the next billing period, your invoice will include charges for the expanded team: 11 seats x $20 = $220 (for the new month) plus an additional charge of 1 x $X. Here, X represents the prorated amount for the period the additional seat was used—for example, $3.3 if the seat was utilized for 5 days.

In essence, you only pay for what you've used, ensuring a fair and accurate billing system.

Annual plan

Use case:

Let's say you start with 10 seats in the Professional plan. The upfront payment for the year would be 10 x $288 = $2880. Now, if you add an extra seat during that year, you'll be charged the immediate prorated amount for that seat (e.g., $144 if added 6 months into the year). On the subsequent billing period (the next year), you'll be billed for the total seats, which would be 11 x $288 = $3168 for the upcoming year.

The same principle applies if you decide to remove seats, resulting in reduced billing on future intervals.

What happens when you deactivate a user

When you deactivate a user, the number of seats will not be decreased automatically!

You will have to do that manually by going into Settings - Billing and updating your Seat count there.


Note that billing and subscription changes can be done by any user with the admin role.
For more information on how to Remove Seats, please visit the following article:
Add and Remove Seats from Your Account

Billing history

You can always access all of your invoices. Head to Settings > Billing history. In this list, you will see all of your invoices. They will be either OPEN or PAID, and you can select the "View invoice" option to open a PDF of the invoice.

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