Subscription and billing

Your subscription decides two things: which features are switched on, and how many staff and stock locations you can have. It all lives under Settings›Your subscription, behind the manage_workshop permission; invoices and the data export are administrators only.

You won't find prices on this page: they depend on your country and billing cycle, and the only reliable source is the plan grid inside the app, which shows the exact figure for your workshop.

The four plans#

Free The shop works: bookings, customers and bikes, work orders and quotes, app and email inbox, courtesy invoice. One user, one stock location and a monthly cap on work orders.

Premium Adds stock and inventory, counter sales, multichannel inbox (WhatsApp, SMS, social), branded reports, AI diagnosis, shifts and roles. The monthly work order cap goes away.

Pro Adds the tax and payment side — e-invoicing to the Italian exchange system, electronic receipts, SoftPOS, card and payment-link collection — plus the route planner, courtesy bikes, customer maintenance subscriptions, acquisition analytics and the AI assistant in the inbox. It's the only plan on which you can buy extra user seats.

Enterprise Multi-site with a consolidated dashboard, franchising stack, custom integrations and a dedicated account manager. You can't activate it yourself: the button sends a contact request and the fee is agreed with you.

The grid at the top of the page shows each plan incrementally ("everything in Premium, plus…") and the Monthly / Annual switch at the top right recalculates prices: on annual billing two months are free. The feature-by-feature list is in Features by plan.

Changing plan#

Going up and going down are not symmetrical, and that's what surprises people most often.

• Upgrade: immediate. The plan activates straight away, at the full fee, with a new start date. Features unlock instantly — the sidebar updates itself, no page reload needed.
• Downgrade: deferred. You stay on your current plan until the period you've already paid for runs out, then the change happens on its own. Until then a "scheduled change" notice stays on the page, with a Cancel change button if you think better of it.
• Free trial: once only. On plans that offer one, your first upgrade can start as a trial: nothing is charged, and the fee begins when it expires. If you move to Free during a trial the change is immediate (not deferred) and nothing is charged.

What you lose by moving down#

A downgrade deletes nothing, but it freezes whatever exceeds the new limits. Worth knowing beforehand, not afterwards.

If you need that stock now, don't wait for a re-upgrade: a frozen location offers a drain action that transfers its stock into the default location, recording the movements. See Stock locations.

Payment method and invoices#

The Payment method card is where you register the card your subscription is charged to. The form opens inside the app and shows the brand, last four digits and expiry of the saved card.

Removing the card blocks nothing immediately, but it has a consequence the app spells out before you confirm: the period you've already paid stays active until it expires and then, with no new payment method, the workshop drops automatically to Free. If you're on a free trial, the message tells you how many days are left and what happens when they run out.

The CrankPal invoices card lists the subscription invoices issued to your workshop, with number, issue date, due date, amount and status. From there you can open the document on screen, download it as PDF and — once it has been transmitted to the exchange system — as XML too. Unpaid invoices have a Pay now button.

If a notice about fiscal details appears above the invoices, the e-invoice can't be sent until the workshop's VAT number is complete: sort it out in Fiscal data verification.

Pausing the workshop#

Summer closing, holidays, a month of building work. Rather than leaving the calendar open and cancelling by hand, there's vacation mode: pick your reopening date and press Pause. Only an administrator can turn it on.

What actually changes:

• The workshop takes no new bookings, neither from the app nor from the customer portal.
• You stay visible in the map locator, but labelled "closed until…".
• You and your team carry on logging in normally: jobs in progress get finished, invoices go out, all your data is right there.

The pause has a maximum length, shown under the date picker. You can extend it by moving the date forward, or press Reactivate now and be back in business earlier than planned, at any time.

If the workshop gets suspended#

Besides a voluntary pause, an account can be suspended by CrankPal. When that happens, a screen appears at login explaining the reason and offering the possible actions — and whatever the reason, it tells you the same important thing: no data has been deleted. Customers, jobs, invoices and stock come back exactly as they were on reactivation.

The possible reasons, in plain language:

• Unpaid subscription — the quickest route is to update the payment method or upload the bank transfer receipt. Alternatively you can move to the Free plan and reactivate the workshop immediately.
• Long inactivity — the account hadn't been used for a long time. You request reactivation from the same screen.
• Verification pending — documents or fiscal details are waiting to be checked: the screen takes you to where you upload them.
• Security — a precautionary lock following a report. This one goes through support.
• Terms of use violation or account closing — in both cases the screen offers you an export of your data and a way to contact support.

If you aren't the administrator, the screen offers to message the owner with a pre-written note: most of the time it's whoever holds the card who needs to click something, not you.

Common problems#