Billing and subscription

Sigil costs £0.70 per licensed mailbox per month, billed monthly, with every feature included. There is a 14 day free trial.

Billing runs on Stripe. Your organisation is a Stripe customer with one per-seat subscription.

Invoices are charged to a card by default. Where invoice terms have been agreed instead, they are emailed and payable within an agreed number of days. Either way your invoice history and any credits are listed in the portal. See invoices and credits.

What counts as a seat

A seat is a licensed member mailbox.

Mailbox type	Billed
Licensed member mailbox	Yes, unless you have excluded it
Shared or resource mailbox	No, unlicensed and therefore free
Microsoft 365 Group or distribution list	No, it is not a user at all
Account invited in from outside	No
Disabled account	No
A mailbox you have excluded	No

Shared mailboxes and group mailboxes still get signatures. They just do not cost anything.

An excluded mailbox is the one case where a mailbox is deliberately taken off both the bill and the service at once. Mailboxes can be excluded one at a time, or by naming an Entra group whose members should all come off. An organisation where only some teams need Sigil can instead turn the list around and name the mailboxes that should have it, in which case everybody unnamed is the one off the bill. See cost management.

Where a group is excluded, its membership is re-read each night just before the seat count is calculated, so a joiner or a leaver reaches the invoice within a day of the change in your directory.

An account that was invited into your organisation stays outside the seat count even if it was later converted to a member account and given a licensed mailbox on one of your own domains. Microsoft Graph records how an account was created and never rewrites it, so a long-term contractor who first arrived as a guest is still recognisable as an invited account years later. The account type on its own is not a reliable test, because an administrator can change it, and a B2B invitee can be made a member from the start.

The exclusion is about counting, not about serving. If such a mailbox composes a message it is still given its signature. It simply does not appear on the invoice, in attribute coverage, or in the directory picker used by test emails and downloads.

Note that attribute coverage counts shared mailboxes, because they still need a signature. Its total will not match your seat count, and that is expected.

A daily job syncs your seat count to the subscription. Quantity changes do not trigger a mid-cycle invoice, so drift never produces a surprise charge partway through a month.

Your organisation is counted on its own rather than as one pass through a list of every customer, so nobody else’s directory problem reaches your invoice. A count that could not be completed is not sent to Stripe at all: if Microsoft Graph fails partway through reading your directory, Sigil retries and leaves the previous quantity standing until a full read succeeds. A short read and a complete one look identical once they are reduced to a number, which is why an incomplete one is reported rather than billed.

Paying for fewer mailboxes

Licensed mailboxes that never send mail from Outlook can be taken off the bill. Excluding one stops its signature and removes its seat, and Sigil will point out which mailboxes are candidates by naming the ones that have never applied a signature. See cost management.

The trial

The trial gives you real seats from day one. Nothing is charged until it ends.

At the end of the trial, Stripe converts the subscription itself:

With a card on file, it charges the card and the subscription becomes active.

With no card on file, it cancels the subscription. An organisation that never adds a card simply stops rather than being billed by surprise.

On invoice terms it converts too, into a first invoice. There is no card for the trial to be missing, so nothing is asked for and nothing is cancelled.

What happens if billing lapses

Once a trial ends without an active subscription, signatures stop. The add-in receives a 402 and applies nothing. A cancelled subscription stops them the same way.

A failed payment does not stop them immediately. Stripe retries a declined card over about three weeks, and signatures carry on throughout, so a card that expired over a weekend is invisible to everybody except whoever reads the notices. Sigil allows 21 days from the first failure, measured from the failure itself rather than from each retry, and signatures stop at the end of that window if the invoice is still unpaid.

On invoice terms the same 21 days apply, counted from the invoice’s due date rather than from a failed payment, since that is the first moment anything is late. Net 30 therefore allows up to 51 days from the invoice being issued.

Paying inside the window ends it. Nothing has to be reprovisioned and nothing was lost, because nothing had stopped yet.

This is the first thing to check when an entire organisation loses its signatures at once, along with whether delivery has been paused. See troubleshooting.

Nothing is deleted when billing lapses. Templates, images, rules, banners and footers all remain. Restoring an active subscription restores signatures.

The portal warns before it stops

Two things stop signatures for a money reason, and the portal says so while there is still something to do about it. A warning appears at the top of every page to anybody who can open Billing.

A trial with no card on file is warned about in its last week, naming the day it ends. An organisation on invoice terms is not, because its trial converts into an invoice rather than needing a card, so there is nothing to warn about.

A failed payment is warned about for as long as the dunning window has left to run, naming the day signatures stop and how many days that is. It reads for both arrangements, since settling it means updating the card or paying the open invoice depending on which you are on.

The warning can be put off for the rest of the browser session, and comes back on the next sign-in. Putting one off does not hide the next: the dismissal is keyed to the date being warned about, so an extended trial or a fresh failure is warned about again.

And says so once they have stopped

Once signatures have actually stopped, a notice sits at the top of every page that cannot be dismissed, naming which of the reasons applies: a cancelled subscription, a trial that ended, dunning that ran out, a suspension, or a provider whose own subscription lapsed. Where there is something you can do about it, it links to Billing. A partner-managed organisation is told to contact its provider instead, because the card is not yours to fix.

The portal also goes read-only at that point. Saving anything is refused rather than accepted into an organisation nobody is serving, so a cancelled organisation does not spend a fortnight editing templates that reach nobody. Billing itself stays open, which is the one thing that has to keep working. So does everything a managed service provider does for its clients, since an MSP’s own organisation lapsing must not stop it running theirs.

Adding and managing a card

Both are self-serve from the Billing view.

Add a card through Stripe Checkout. The card you add is promoted to the default payment method for invoices automatically.

Manage cards through the Stripe customer portal, also linked from the Billing view.

An organisation on invoice terms has no card, and the Billing view offers none: the buttons are not shown rather than shown and refused.

What the Billing view shows

Subscription status, seats in use, how the account is collected, your invoice history, and any credits applied to your account.

Where the card would be, an account on invoice terms reads “Invoice, net 30”, or whatever term was agreed. A credit waiting on the account is shown there too, with a note that it comes off the next invoice.

Invoices and credits each have a list of their own further down the page. See invoices and credits.

The per-seat price is shown for reference. The authoritative rate is the one held in Stripe.

Where a discount has been agreed, the estimate line shows it too.

The arrangement it names

The view leads with the commercial arrangement your organisation is actually on, rather than leaving you to infer it from whether a card is present.

Shown as	What it means
Trial	Free until the trial ends, then billed per seat
Per-seat	Billed monthly for the seats in use
Billed via partner	Your provider is invoiced for your seats and you are not billed directly
Comped	Free by arrangement. No card or subscription is required
NFR	Not for resale: free internal use while you are an active partner
Internal	Tophhie Cloud’s own organisation

The last three mean nobody is invoiced, and the view says so with a “Not billed” badge and drops the subscription panel and the billing details form entirely. There is nothing to fix, so offering a card to add would only invite somebody to try. Those organisations also see both billing steps on the Getting started checklist marked optional.

Billed via partner is not the same as being free. Somebody is invoiced for those seats, it is your provider rather than you, and the view names them and the seat count they are carrying on your behalf.

The arrangement is worked out from your account rather than stored as a label of its own, so it cannot fall out of step with what actually gets charged.

Discounts

A discount is agreed with Sigil rather than entered in the portal. There is no coupon field. Once it is in place, the Billing view shows it on the estimate line as a percentage off the per-seat price, and the estimated monthly figure above it already has the reduction applied.

A discount either runs open-ended or for an agreed number of months, up to five years. Where there is an end date, the Billing view prints it next to the percentage, so the date the price changes is visible well before it arrives.

The same reduction is attached to the Stripe subscription, so the invoice and the estimate agree rather than being two separate numbers that have to be reconciled.

When an agreed term runs out, the discount stops applying and invoices return to full price. Nothing is charged retrospectively, and nothing needs cancelling. The portal stops showing the discount on the day it lapses rather than whenever Sigil next tidies its own records, so the estimate never advertises a reduction that is no longer reaching the invoice.

A term is counted in whole months from the day the discount is attached. That is how Stripe counts a repeating discount, so a discount cannot be set to run until a particular calendar date. Two consequences are worth knowing:

A discount attached during the trial starts counting from then, so a 14 day trial uses part of the first month before anything is charged.

Cancelling and later reactivating does not restart the term. Only the months still outstanding carry onto the new subscription, rounded up to the next whole month.

Billing profile

The company details that appear on the invoice are held separately and pushed to Stripe whenever you save them, and an edit made in the Stripe customer portal is mirrored back here. See billing profile.

Cancelling

Cancel from the Billing view, behind a confirmation that spells out what happens next.

Cancelling does not stop service on the spot. Direct organisations are invoiced per seat monthly in advance, so the month you have already paid for runs out first: the subscription is scheduled to end at the close of the current period, and signatures carry on until then. Cancelling during a trial ends it on the day the trial was already due to end, and nothing is charged. No further invoices are raised either way.

Until that date the Billing view says the subscription is ending and names the day. Changing your mind before it arrives costs nothing: reactivating lifts the scheduled end from the same subscription, and it continues as though it had never been cancelled.

After it has ended, reactivating is a new subscription rather than a resumed one. The first invoice is raised straight away and the seat meter restarts, which the confirmation says before anything is charged.

The card is released when it ends

Once the cancellation completes, the saved card is detached from your record. Your customer record and invoice history stay, because finance needs them, but a card that nothing is going to be charged to is data with no further use.

The exception is an invoice still open with an amount owed. That card stays as the means of settling it, and is released as soon as the invoice clears.

The consequence is worth knowing before you cancel: reactivating later means adding a card again. Reactivating with no card on file leaves the first invoice unpayable, which the Billing view warns about rather than letting you find out from a failed payment.

None of this applies on invoice terms. There is no card to release, and reactivating simply raises the next invoice on the terms you already had.

Nothing is deleted

Cancelling never schedules deletion. Templates, images, rules, banners, footers and settings are all kept, so rejoining later picks up where you left off.

To remove Sigil properly, also withdraw admin consent in Entra and remove the add-in from Integrated apps.

If you want your data deleted rather than left dormant, ask support to deprovision the tenant. That cancels billing and purges every record, asset and cached entry belonging to your organisation, bar the two exceptions set out in data and privacy.

Managed by a partner

If a managed service provider runs Sigil for you, your organisation has no subscription of its own. Your seats are counted into your partner’s consolidated subscription and your partner bills you through their own arrangement.

The Billing view reflects that rather than offering you a card to add. See partner billing.

Who can see billing

Admins and the Billing role. Editors, Marketing, Viewers and Compliance do not reach it.

The Billing role exists so the person who pays for Sigil does not also have to be given the signature templates. It reaches the subscription, the billing profile, cost management and the user list, and nothing else. See users and roles.

Cost management is a separate permission from billing rather than part of it, so that a managed service provider can reach it for a client without also reaching that client’s card and invoices.