Buying works differently depending on whether your company already has a running subscription. Both routes start on the Billing page, and both require the Management Admin role.
First purchase: the setup wizard
When your company has no paid subscription running (a new company, one on a free trial or demo access, or one whose subscription has lapsed), every plan card is buyable and Buy Now! opens a wizard instead of going straight to payment. On a free trial or demo access, the Subscribe button on a plan row in the Subscription card opens the same wizard, pre-filled with that plan.
The wizard is titled Set up your subscription and has two steps.
Step 1 of 2 — Choose your plan. Each plan is listed with its price per vessel per month and a Vessels field. Set how many vessels you want to pay for on each plan; you can buy more than one plan, and you can buy spare slots for vessels you will add later. A plan you set to zero is not bought.
Your vessels. If your company already has vessels, they are listed underneath, each showing which plan it is currently on. For every vessel you must choose either Keep on the plan you want it on (only plans you are actually buying are offered) or Archive it. This section is skipped for a company with no vessels yet. The trial's sample vessel is never listed: it is deleted automatically once the payment succeeds.
The Review button stays disabled until the configuration is valid, and the reason is written underneath it: Choose at least one plan to buy, Decide what to do with every vessel, or a message naming the plans that have more vessels assigned than seats bought.
Step 2 of 2 — Review. A summary of what you are buying, per plan, plus a Total per month excluding VAT. Any plan you currently hold but are not buying is listed under Removing unused plan(s) — those are dropped once the purchase completes. Confirm and Pay sends you to the secure checkout page; Back returns you to step 1.
Nothing changes in the app while you are in the wizard. Vessels are moved to their new plans, and old plans removed, only once the payment has actually succeeded.
The checkout page
Confirm and Pay hands you over to Nauticare's payment provider on a secure hosted page. There you enter the billing address (required), optionally a tax/VAT ID, and any promotion code you have been given. Tax is calculated automatically from the address you enter, which is why the prices shown in Nauticare are always quoted excluding VAT.
When the payment goes through you are returned to the Billing page and the subscription switches to Active. If you abandon the page, you are returned to Billing with nothing bought and nothing changed.
With a payment method that does not confirm immediately — a bank debit, for instance — the subscription is not activated at the moment you submit. It activates once the payment actually clears, so the Billing page can briefly still show Not Active after you have paid.
Buying more once a subscription is running
Once a subscription is live, plan cards no longer go through the wizard or the checkout page. Set the Vessel Count on the card and press Buy Now!: the plan is added to your existing subscription straight away, charged pro-rata for the remainder of the current period, and appears in the Subscription card. You are not asked to pay again separately — it goes onto the same payment method.
Two things block this:
- A plan you already hold shows Purchased instead of a buy button. Use the vessel-count controls on the Subscription card to grow it.
- While a payment is failing, buy options disappear from the page entirely. Fix the payment method first — see When a subscription lapses.
Free trial and demo access
A company that signed up itself starts on a free trial, marked by a yellow Free Trial chip in the Subscription card. A company Nauticare has set up for a trial carries a red Demo Access chip instead. In both cases the card reads Not Active, because the plans held are granted rather than bought. They all stay buyable and there is no Manage Subscription button. Buying goes through the Set up your subscription wizard exactly as it does for a new company, and once the payment succeeds the company becomes a normal paying customer. See Free trial and the sample vessel for what the self-service trial includes.
Both have an end date, shown as CURRENT PERIOD END. When it passes, the same restrictions apply as for a lapsed subscription, so buy before then if you want to carry on without interruption.
When a card offers "Contact us" instead
If your company is billed by arrangement rather than through the app, the plan cards show a Contact us button and the address to write to instead of buy controls. Purchases are then made through Nauticare rather than self-service.