View as customer: try a customer’s plan

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View as customer: try a customer’s plan

An admin-only tester that shows the Contractor Hub as a customer on any plan or billing state would see it, without charging anything.

View as customer lets a site administrator see the Contractor Hub exactly as a contractor on a given plan or billing state would, so you can check what each plan includes and what a late payer sees.

Before you start

  • You must be a WordPress administrator. Customers never see this tool, and the website refuses everyone else.
  • Open the Contractor Hub in your browser, signed in as the administrator.

Steps

  1. Look for the floating button at the bottom left, labelled 🧪 View as customer.
  2. Tap it. A panel opens titled Test the customer experience.
  3. Pick a state. Options are grouped:
    – Start: “No plan yet (new sign-up)” and “Free trial”.
    – Paid plans: one entry per plan, such as “Professional plan (paid)”.
    – When payment fails: “Payment overdue: some tools paused”, “Payment overdue: read-only”, “Suspended”, and “Subscription ended”.
  4. The page reloads. The button now reads 🧪 Viewing as: [state] and turns orange.
  5. Use the Hub normally and see what that customer would see.
  6. To stop, open the panel and tap ← Back to my own account.

What it does and does not do

  • It applies only to your own administrator account, in your own requests. Nobody else is affected.
  • It changes nothing stored about any subscription. The choice is one short-lived setting that ends by itself after 8 hours.
  • Billing actions are refused while you view: checkout, confirm, plan change, cancel, card portal, preferences, and phone or email verification codes. You will see: “Test view: billing actions are switched off while you view as a customer, so nothing is charged or changed. Choose “Back to my own account” to turn billing buttons back on.”
  • The Hub’s real data is still yours. The usage bars measure your real customers and records against that plan’s limits.
  • While viewing, billing is treated as live, even if you switched billing off.

Use it with the Entitlements page

Plan contents come from the plan matrix (see [entitlements-admin-page]). Change a plan’s feature, then use View as customer to confirm the plan now shows or hides it.

Note: which plan includes which feature is a placeholder set in the code and is not approved.

Tips

  • Check “Payment overdue: some tools paused” after editing the failure settings in the Plans page, to see what pauses.
  • Check “Free trial” to see what a brand-new contractor gets.

If something goes wrong

  • The button is missing: you are not an administrator, or the Hub has not finished loading.
  • You are stuck in a test state: open the panel and choose ← Back to my own account. It also ends after 8 hours.
  • A billing button does nothing: that is expected while viewing.

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