What does "Past Due" subscription status mean?

Past Due is the status Valid Email Checker assigns when the scheduled renewal charge on your monthly plan fails. It is not a soft warning — the renewal already happened, the card was declined, and a pending invoice is waiting on you to settle. The clock on that invoice is 7 days, and what happens at the end of those 7 days depends entirely on whether you pay.

What triggers Past Due

The renewal cron runs on your billing date and attempts a single off-session charge against your default card. When that charge fails — expired card, insufficient funds, fraud-block, issuer decline — three things happen at the same moment:

1. A pending invoice (format VEC-25-XXXXXXXX) is created with a 7-day due date.
2. Your subscription status flips from active to past_due, with current_period_end and next_billing_date both moved to 7 days from now.
3. An invoice email is sent containing the amount, due date, and direct payment link.

What still works during Past Due

Your monthly credits stay available the entire 7 days. Bulk verifications, the dashboard single-email check, the API — all of it keeps running. PAYG credits are completely untouched (they never expire regardless of subscription state). The only visible change in the app is a red past-due banner across the top of Billing & Payments with a Pay button.

How to recover

Pay the pending invoice. That single action reactivates the subscription. The badge flips back to Active, current_period_end resets to 30 days from the payment, and the missed renewal is considered resolved. See how to pay a pending invoice manually for the step-by-step. Adding a new card alone does not retry the renewal — see how VEC retries failed renewals for why.

What happens if you do nothing

• On day 7, the renewal cron sees the unpaid invoice and transitions the subscription from past_due to cancelled.
• The monthly credit bucket is zeroed in the same step.
• Any remaining pending or overdue invoices are auto-cancelled.
• A second email (subscription_cancelled_unpaid) lands with the cancellation confirmation.
• PAYG credits stay forever — they are independent of this flow.

If 7 days is not enough for you (long bank hold, fraud verification, family emergency), email support before the grace expires. Manual extensions are rare but possible. See the full mechanics in what happens if my card fails on a renewal.