How to auto-charge customers every month (and the rules you have to follow)

Before you can bill a card every month, you need the customer’s clear agreement to that specific arrangement, captured on its own rather than buried in your terms, plus a written record of it and a way for them to cancel as easily as they signed up. Then you choose one of two things: auto-send, where the invoice goes out and they pay it, or auto-charge, where you keep the card and run it yourself. The second one is where the rules bite.

The federal picture changed in 2025. The FTC’s “click-to-cancel” rule was struck down and the agency is rewriting it, so that rule is not in force right now. What does bind you today is your payment processor’s requirements and your state’s auto-renewal law, and those are stricter than most people realize.

Auto-send or auto-charge?

These get muddled, and they are very different commitments.

For a plan with a fixed monthly price (a maintenance plan, a retainer, a monitoring fee, a weekly cleaning; see AI receptionist for a cleaning business for the phone side of that one), auto-charge is what people actually want, because chasing a $29 invoice can cost more than the invoice. Just don’t switch it on without the paperwork below.

What you must capture before you store a card

This is the part that gets skipped. Stripe’s documentation spells it out: you are responsible for your own compliance, you should “add terms to your website or app that state how you plan to save payment method details and allow customers to opt in,” and you must “explicitly collect consent from the customer for this specific use,” with a “Save my payment method for future use” checkbox as its example.

To charge a card when the customer isn’t there, Stripe says your terms must include four things:

1. Their agreement to you starting a payment, or a series of payments, on their behalf.
2. The anticipated timing and frequency of the payments.
3. How you work out the amount.
4. Your cancellation policy, if it’s a subscription.

And then: “Make sure you keep a record of your customer’s written agreement to these terms.”

Square asks for the same thing in plainer words. Its recurring invoice help page says you need “a one-time consent from the cardholder to charge the payment card on file on an ongoing basis until the cardholder withdraws permission.”

Two practical consequences. A tick-box buried in your general terms of service isn’t consent to a recurring charge. And a verbal “yeah, put it on the card” on a job site is not a record at all. Turn it into one before you charge anything: text or email the terms from the van and get a “yes” back in writing. Your own note of what they said is better than nothing, and worse than a reply you can forward to a card network. That record is the document you send when someone disputes a charge.

What the enrollment form should say

Everything above fits in a short block next to the card field:

Comfort Club — $29/month Two tune-ups a year, priority scheduling, 15% off repairs. I authorize Northside Heating & Air to charge this card $29 every month until I cancel. The price can change only with 30 days’ written notice. I can cancel any time by replying to any invoice, emailing office@example.com, or calling 555-0142. ☐ I agree to the above and to saving my card for these monthly payments.

Leave the box unticked, store the date and time it was ticked, and email a copy to the customer. That one email is your record.

Where the federal rules stand in 2026

If you’ve read that “click-to-cancel” is the law, that’s out of date.

The FTC finalized its click-to-cancel rule in October 2024, the Eighth Circuit vacated it in July 2025, and in March 2026 the FTC started over. Its announcement of 11 March 2026 asks for comment on whether to adopt “provisions of the vacated 2024 Rule or some other provisions,” which is the agency itself confirming the 2024 rule is gone. Comments ran for 30 days from 13 March 2026.

So there is no federal click-to-cancel rule on you today. There is still a federal statute. If you enroll customers online, the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act already requires clear disclosure of the terms, informed consent before you charge, and a simple way to stop the charges. The FTC enforces it, and has kept bringing those cases since the rule was vacated. Add your processor’s requirements, which apply whatever Washington does, and your state’s auto-renewal law, which may be stricter than the vacated federal rule ever was.

This is how we read the rules as of October 2026, not legal advice. If your plan is big enough to matter, have a lawyer read your enrollment form once.

Your state probably has its own rule

California’s is the one to design for, because it’s the strictest and because you’ll eventually bill someone there.

Per a Barnes & Thornburg alert of 7 July 2025, AB 2863 took effect on 1 July 2025 and requires businesses to get “the consumer’s express affirmative consent to the renewal or continuous service terms,” to “retain verification of the consumer’s affirmative consent for a minimum of three years or one year following contract termination, whichever is longer,” to let customers cancel “through the same channel used to initiate the subscription,” and to send an annual reminder with the renewal frequency, the amount charged and how to cancel.

Read that list against a typical maintenance plan sold on a doorstep and you’ll see the gaps: no separate consent, no stored proof, and cancellation only by phoning the office during business hours.

California is not alone. New York, Colorado, Virginia and Minnesota have their own auto-renewal rules, and several require notice before a price change, which is why the script above promises 30 days. The cheap way to handle all of it is to build to the strictest rule once, for everybody, rather than keeping a different process per state.

Setting it up, step by step

1. Decide the plan and the cadence. See the last FAQ if you are torn between monthly and annual.
2. Write the authorization block and put it wherever people enrol, on paper and online.
3. Take the card through your processor’s own form, so the number never lands in your email, your CRM notes or a photo on a phone.
4. Email the confirmation with the price, the cadence, the next charge date and how to cancel. Keep it; that’s your record.
5. Schedule the first charge for a date you’ll remember, not the day of signing.
6. Decide what happens on a decline before it happens: how many retries, who calls, and when the plan pauses.
7. Diary the renewal and the annual reminder. California’s amended law is read as requiring an annual reminder with the frequency, the amount and how to cancel; sending one is cheap insurance either way.

What to do when the card fails

Expired and reissued cards mean any plan with more than a handful of customers will see declines. Handle them like this:

• Retry on a schedule, not instantly. A card declined for funds may clear in a few days.
• Tell the customer the same day, with a link to pay or update the card. Most declines are an expired card, not a refusal.
• Keep a hard stop. After a set number of failures, pause the plan rather than sending charges into the void every month.
• Never re-run a charge you’re unsure about. A duplicate charge costs you more trust than a missed one.
• Switch on your processor’s card updater. Stripe and most processors can refresh a card number that the bank has reissued, which removes a large share of declines before you see them.

One technical note worth knowing: a recurring charge has to be flagged to the card networks as merchant-initiated against the stored credential, rather than sent as if the customer were sitting there. Stripe does that when you charge off-session. It is the difference between a charge that goes through quietly and one that gets queried.

How maintenance plans get billed in Stack Space

Stack Space has recurring invoices, which is the billing half of a maintenance plan. You set a customer, the line items, a cadence of every week, every two weeks, monthly, quarterly or annual, and the date of the first invoice. Whatever day that lands on becomes the billing day from then on. A background job picks the schedule up in the morning, builds the invoice, emails it with your branding and a pay link, and moves the schedule to the next cycle. You can pause or resume a schedule at any time, or delete it.

Auto-charge is off by default, which matches the consent rules above. When you switch it on for a schedule, nothing is charged until the customer opts in. The first invoice goes out with a pay link as usual. On that pay page there is an unticked box that says, in your business’s name, that their card will be charged automatically each cycle for the invoices on this plan, the current amount, and how to stop it. If they tick it and pay, the card is saved in your Stripe account and later invoices on that plan are charged to it without them present. We keep the wording they agreed to, the time and the checkout it happened in, and you see the card and the date it was authorized on the schedule. If you later raise the price or change how often the plan bills, the saved card stops being charged until the customer agrees to the new terms on the next invoice’s pay page. Every invoice on the plan carries a “Stop automatic payments” button, so cancelling happens on the same page they signed up on; you get a notification when someone uses it, and their invoices go back to arriving with a pay link.

When a charge succeeds, the customer gets an emailed receipt from you, because a charge nobody was told about is the most common source of a dispute. A guard stops the same invoice being charged twice. If the card is declined, the invoice is emailed with a pay link that same day, and if the bank’s reason is one that can clear (not enough funds, a temporary decline), we try the same saved card again 3 days and 7 days later, with no further emails to the customer. A card reported lost or stolen, or a payment the customer told their bank to stop, is never tried again; you get a notification instead. Retries stop as soon as the invoice is paid some other way, you void it, the customer stops automatic payments, or you pause the plan. You get a notification when the second try is declined, while there’s still one try left, and another if the third fails, so you can call them. The plan itself keeps running, and the next invoice tries the card again.

Payments run through your own Stripe account, so the card is stored by your processor, not by us. If you also take plans on paper or over the phone, keep that customer’s signed or emailed agreement yourself; the consent record we keep covers the pay-page opt-in.

The visits are a separate step. You can book a repeating appointment on the calendar (every week, every two weeks, every four weeks or every month, for a set number of visits or until you stop it), but it isn’t tied to the billing plan: you set up the visits and the recurring invoice yourself, and changing one doesn’t change the other. Field-service platforms link the two, and if that’s what you need, say so when you’re comparing: Housecall Pro’s service agreements auto-bill monthly, quarterly or annually and “automatically schedule recurring maintenance jobs based on the selected service agreement.” We don’t put the tune-up on a dispatch board.

Plans are $30, $125, $355 or $800 a month, with no free trial. The AI receptionist that answers your phone is on every one of them, and a “yes” on a call can become an estimate and then an invoice without re-typing anything: see how a yes becomes a paid invoice.

FAQ

Can I charge a customer’s card every month without asking each time?

Yes, if you got their explicit agreement to recurring charges when you stored the card, disclosed the timing, the frequency, how you calculate the amount and how to cancel, and kept a record of it. Stripe requires all of that, and so do several states.

Is click-to-cancel still the law?

Not as a rule. The FTC’s 2024 click-to-cancel rule was vacated by the Eighth Circuit in July 2025, and in March 2026 the FTC asked for comment on a replacement. But if you sell online, the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act still requires informed consent and a simple way to cancel, and state auto-renewal laws such as California’s AB 2863 require cancellation through the same channel people used to sign up. Treat easy cancellation as required, not optional.

What’s the difference between a recurring invoice and a subscription charge?

A recurring invoice is created and sent on a schedule, and the customer pays it. A subscription, or auto-charge, runs the saved card on that schedule without the customer doing anything. The second needs stored card details and recurring-payment consent.

How long do I have to keep the customer’s authorization?

California requires proof of consent for at least three years, or one year after the agreement ends, whichever is longer. Keeping the confirmation email you sent at sign-up is usually enough.

What cadence should a maintenance plan use?

Monthly is easiest for customers to say yes to and spreads your revenue evenly. Annual collects the cash up front but makes the renewal conversation a bigger one. Quarterly fits plans with seasonal visits.