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Subscription Grace States

Module: ChemIQ For: Admin (billing decisions); Manager (status awareness)

When your Tellus subscription lapses, your Public SDS Portal does not vanish. SDS access is a safety obligation under OSHA — not a payment lever — and Tellus is explicit about that policy in code. Your portal goes through a 30-day grace window during which everything keeps working, then a suspended state during which a minimal "deactivated" page still shows your emergency contact.

This page documents the three states (Active, Grace, Suspended), what visitors see in each, and what you can do at each stage to restore your portal.

The Three States​

StateWhen you're in itPortal behaviorVisitor experience
ActiveSubscription is current and paidNormal full functionalityNo banner, no degradation
GraceSubscription is past-due, but within 30 days of the past-due datePortal still works fully; a small banner appearsBanner: "This SDS access is being transitioned — contact your EHS coordinator"
SuspendedMore than 30 days past-duePortal serves a minimal "deactivated" pageBranded deactivated page with the emergency contact still visible

The grace clock starts at the moment the billing system marks your account as past_due — typically when an auto-renewal payment fails or a manual invoice goes unpaid. It does not start when you cancel intentionally (cancellation is a different flow with its own off-boarding).

Active — Normal Operation​

The default state. Your portal renders cleanly:

  • The branded catalog at sds.tellusehs.com/{your-slug} shows your products with no banners
  • Per-product pages at sds.tellusehs.com/{your-slug}/{product-slug} render normally
  • Site binders at sds.tellusehs.com/s/{token} render normally, with the standard "Last synced" banner

Visitors have no indication of your billing state. They shouldn't — your billing is between you and Tellus.

Grace — The 30-Day Window​

You enter Grace when an invoice goes past-due. Tellus notifies you by email (sent to the billing contact and any admins on your account) so that the first sign of trouble doesn't come from a customer.

What Visitors See​

All portal pages remain fully functional. A subtle banner appears at the top of every public page:

"This SDS access is being transitioned — contact your EHS coordinator: [name + phone]."

The banner is intentionally low-stakes copy — it doesn't say "this company didn't pay their bill" because that's not what visitors need to know. What they need to know is that there's a transition happening and a human can answer questions if something looks wrong.

What Doesn't Change in Grace​

  • Catalog still resolves
  • Per-product pages still render the full Hazard Snapshot, Safety Summary, and SDS PDF download
  • Site binder pages still resolve, refresh, and cache offline as normal
  • Site posters with active tokens continue to work — scanned QRs still load the binder
  • Existing offline cached binders on workers' phones continue to refresh on their normal sync schedule

What This Means for You​

A 30-day grace period is generous. It exists for two reasons:

  1. Real billing disputes take time. A failed credit card, a switched payment processor, a transition between cost centers — these often take 1-2 weeks to resolve through normal procurement channels. The grace window covers that.
  2. SDS access is a worker-safety obligation. Cutting it off the moment a payment fails would expose workers to a hazard for reasons that have nothing to do with their employer's safety culture. Tellus's policy is to honor the safety obligation through any reasonable billing dispute.

The grace banner is also a soft prompt for you to fix the underlying billing issue. Open the Billing panel in AdminHQ (or follow the link in the past-due notification email) to update your payment method, retry the failed charge, or contact support.

Suspended — After 30 Days Past-Due​

If 30 days pass without the past-due invoice being resolved, your portal moves to Suspended. This is the only state in which visitor-facing access actually degrades.

What Visitors See​

Public catalog and per-product URLs return a branded "deactivated" page. The page shows:

  • Your company logo (the last branding you had saved)
  • A clear message: "This SDS portal has been temporarily deactivated."
  • Your emergency contact — the same 4-field block with name, role label, and tap-callable phone

Critically, the deactivated page is not a 404 and not an empty error page. It's a branded, human-readable page with a real phone number on it. A worker who scans an old poster during an incident — even after the portal has been suspended — still gets a human to call.

This is non-negotiable in Tellus's design: SDS access is a safety obligation, not a payment lever. We don't yank access immediately. We don't show a payment-related error message to a customer or worker. The emergency contact stays visible all the way through.

What Doesn't Work in Suspended​

  • The catalog is gone — search and product grid don't render
  • Per-product pages are gone — Safety Summary, Hazard Snapshot, and SDS PDF download are not available
  • Site binder pages are gone — workers scanning a QR see the deactivated page
  • Cached offline binders on workers' phones will refuse to serve once their 24-hour cache cap is hit (since the server-side resource is suspended, no fresh sync can succeed)
  • Site posters still display the QR code — but scanning them yields the deactivated page

Restoring From Suspended​

Restoring the portal is straightforward once billing is resolved:

  1. Resolve the past-due invoice — update payment method or work with Tellus support
  2. Tellus moves the subscription back to Active immediately on successful payment
  3. The portal returns to full functionality within minutes

No data is lost during Suspended. Your slug, your published products, your branding, your site posters, and your emergency contact records are all preserved. Restoring is a flip of a flag, not a re-publication.

Why This Design​

Two principles drive the grace-state behavior:

SDS Access Is a Safety Obligation, Not a Payment Lever​

Workers don't pay Tellus. Workers depend on Tellus for SDS access during chemical exposures, spills, and accidents. The decision to cut off worker-facing access is a decision that puts workers at risk for reasons that have nothing to do with worker safety. Tellus is structurally unwilling to make that trade in the first 30 days of a billing dispute — and even at the suspended state, we keep the emergency contact visible.

Most Billing Disputes Are Resolvable​

A typical past-due event resolves within 7-14 days once the customer notices. Auto-renewal failures, expired cards, switched processors, ACH return events — these are routine. A 30-day window covers the vast majority of cases with margin to spare. Suspending immediately would punish good-faith customers for routine billing-system noise.

If your account is more than 30 days past-due, the right move from Tellus is to suspend the portal but preserve the emergency contact. The right move from you is to call us — even a partial payment plan keeps the portal in Active.

What This Doesn't Cover​

Two related scenarios are governed by different rules:

ScenarioWhat governs it
You intentionally cancel your subscriptionStandard off-boarding flow (covered in the Manage Billing guide) — Tellus provides a data-export window before any deactivation.
You request that Tellus suspend the portal immediately (e.g., a security incident with a leaked URL)Contact support — this is an emergency manual action, not a grace-state behavior.
A single poster token is rotated or revokedA per-poster action — does not affect overall portal state. See Site Access Posters.

Permissions​

RoleCan see grace bannerCan resolve billing
Admin✓✓
Manager✓—
Program Coordinator✓—
Employee— (they see the visitor-facing banner only)—

Only Admins can update payment methods or contact billing support. Managers and Coordinators see the banner as an awareness signal but cannot resolve the underlying issue.