Has anyone have an issue with using Google Play gift cards? I used a $30 card to pay for a Year’s subscription to the step smash app. I received an email saying that my payment was rejected and that my trial ended on March the 11th of 2026. I was told that the subscription was over $30 when it was stated at the time of purchase that it was 27.99, so I should have had more than enough to pay for the year subscription. I went to top it up because the difference was only a couple of dollars and it will only allow me to top up my account with my credit card which I’m not comfortable using. So right now I don’t know where I stand is my Play card been reimbursed for the money that I had redeemed or has that money been lost? Now the app is telling me that my trial period will expire on the 25th of March of 2026. Can anyone explain to me what is going on have I paid my year subscription, have I lost my $30, are they just verifying that I did in fact purchase the Google Play gift card.
I’m really sorry you’re running into this. I know billing issues are incredibly frustrating, especially when everything looks like it should be working.
Unfortunately, we do not have direct visibility into or control over billing problems with Google Play or the App Store.
We do not process payments ourselves, and we do not receive your payment details such as credit card information or other sensitive billing data. For Google Play purchases, Google handles the transaction directly and then pays us separately at the end of the month. Subscription status works in a similar way. Google tells us things like whether a trial is active and when a subscription starts or ends, so StepSmash can behave correctly, but we cannot directly manage or fix the billing side of it.
Your subscription currently shows an expiration date of March 25th because Google Play gives developers the option to allow a short grace period when a payment is late or does not go through, and we currently have that set to a days. In other words, that date does not necessarily mean the payment succeeded. It may simply mean your subscription is still in Google Play’s grace period while they continue trying to process it.
We also are not given a direct support contact at Google that we can use to escalate billing issues for customers.
For Google Play specifically, the best official resource we can point you to is Google’s support documentation:
Since you mentioned that your gift card balance seems to have disappeared, one thing I would suggest checking is your current Google Play balance directly in the Play Store app. Speaking from my own experience as an Android and Google Play user, when I have had purchase issues in the past, the money that seemingly disappeared was added to my account balance to be used for future purchases.
You can check it here:
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Open the Google Play Store app
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Tap your profile icon in the top right
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Go to Payments & subscriptions → Payment methods
At the top of that screen, you should see your Google Play balance if one is available on the account. Hopefully that helps confirm whether the gift card funds are still sitting in your Google Play balance, or whether something else happened on Google’s side.
I know this has been a frustrating experience, and I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with it. While we cannot fix the Google Play billing side directly, we do want to help however we can, so we’re going to add a complimentary month of StepSmash+ to your account. You’ll be able to see it in StepSmash by navigating to Settings → StepSmash+ and it will show up under the Purchases heading as a plus subscription granted via support.
Hi Justin,
Thank you for getting back to me in less than 24 hours, it means a lot and shows that your company is accountable to it’s members and values us as consumers. I will try and follow up with google.
Sincerely
Kelly
Me too, I have exactly the same problem.
It’s a bit scary. 
Good luck to us.
I tried to top up my account by adding another gift card. The original card hasn’t been used since they are asking for $31.91, in my opinion, they also told me that my gift card was rejected. I tried to use the card again since they rejected it, they told me it was already used. So Google Play has $30.00 of mine. When I added the $25.00 giftcard my balance was $25.00. LOL It seems that they will not use that card to cover the $1.91 that was not covered by the orginal 30 dollar gift card.
So Google has $55.00 of my money and want my credit card number to repay for Stepsmash, there’s not a chance of that happening.
One thing I’m curious about is whether your receipts show tax being added at the time of purchase. If so, it’s possible that the final total ended up slightly higher than the gift card value, even if the listed subscription price looked like it should fit within the balance.
We haven’t seen this kind of issue after a trial on the App Store, but we have seen a small number of similar cases on Google Play. Now that two of you have reported nearly the same problem, I’m starting to wonder if the third-party paywall tool we use in StepSmash may be showing the pre-tax price instead of the final total charged through Google Play.
@KellyMac, were you able to check your Google Play balance to see what happened to the rest of the original gift card funds? I did a bit more digging, and this link should take you directly to the page where your Google Play balance should show: