Plans & Billing — who can upgrade a plan
Plans & Billing is where you change your plan, see invoices, and manage your payment method. It opens as a panel over whatever page you're on — from your profile menu (Plans & billing), or from any Upgrade Plan button in the app.
Not everyone on an account can open it. This page explains who can, what you see if you can't, and how to fix it.
Who can open Plans & Billing
Only three kinds of people:
Owner and Billing contact are set under Settings → User Management, in the Account contacts card. See the Account Contacts guide for how to set them.
This is deliberate: plan changes and payment details shouldn't be reachable by every team member. Being an account admin is not the same as being the Owner.
Where Upgrade Plan buttons appear
You'll meet an upgrade prompt in a few places:
- On a locked feature — a blurred panel with a lock, e.g. User Management or Database Connector when your plan doesn't include it.
- When you hit a limit — for example the brand-links quota, or the cloaked-links domain limit.
- In the limits panel, which shows your event usage against your plan.
Each of those offers an Upgrade Plan button — but only if you're allowed to open Plans & Billing.
What you see if you can't upgrade
Instead of the Upgrade Plan button, you'll see:
Ask your account owner or billing contact to upgrade your plan.
That's not an error and nothing has gone wrong. It means you're on the account but you're not the Owner or the Billing contact, so the plan isn't yours to change. Forward the request to whoever holds those roles on your account.
The happy path — upgrading
- Sign in as the account Owner or Billing contact.
- Click any Upgrade Plan button, or open your profile menu → Plans & billing.
- The panel opens on Plans. Pick the plan you want and follow the checkout.
Common questions
"I'm the account owner, but I see 'Ask your account owner to upgrade'." Billing access is granted when you sign in, not the moment you're made Owner. If you were made Owner (or Billing contact) during your current session, sign out and back in. If it still says that after a fresh sign-in, escalate — see below.
"I clicked Upgrade Plan, the address bar changed, but nothing opened." This was a defect in an earlier version: the button changed the URL without opening the panel for people who weren't allowed to open it. It's fixed — those users now see the "ask your account owner" message instead. If you can still reproduce a button that does nothing, escalate.
"Nobody on our account can open Plans & Billing." That means the account has no Owner and no Billing contact set. Someone has to set them first, under Settings → User Management → Account contacts. If that page is itself locked for you (User Management isn't in your plan), you can't break the deadlock yourself — contact Routy support and we'll set the Owner for you.
"I can manage users, so why can't I manage billing?" They're separate permissions. Managing team members is a user-management permission; changing the plan is reserved for the Owner and Billing contact.
For support agents
When a customer reports "I can't upgrade" or "the upgrade button does nothing", work through this in order:
- Does the account have an Owner / Billing contact set? Check Sys Admin → Affiliates → [the account] → Users → the Account contacts card. If both are empty, nobody on that account can reach billing. Set the Owner there on the customer's behalf.
- Is the person reporting it one of those two contacts? If not, that's expected behavior — point them at whoever is.
- Have they signed in since being made a contact? Billing access is granted at sign-in. Ask them to sign out and back in.
- If they are a contact, have signed in fresh, and still see the "ask your account owner" message — escalate.
When to escalate to engineering
- A confirmed Owner or Billing contact has signed out and back in and still can't open Plans & Billing.
- An Upgrade Plan button changes the address bar but opens nothing.
- Plans & Billing opens but the plans, invoices, or usage fail to load.