What happens when your subscription ends

Why we are writing this

We have gotten many questions recently asking what happens to their account when their paid plan ends. This is a very fair question, and most providers will tell you through a support article. We would rather be upfront about it so nobody has to dig through their settings panel, hoping they do not lose anything. In short, nothing is deleted. Your mail stays where it is, and you can pick the plan back up later exactly where you left off.

What expiry actually means

There are two main paths to a subscription ending:

1. You cancel it on purpose.
2. The renewal payment fails, and we cannot recover it.

Both will end up in the same place eventually, but the timeline is different.

If you cancel, your plan will keep running until the end of the billing period that you’ve already paid for. You are not refunded for the unused time, but you also do not lose access to the account ever. When a period ends, the plan goes back to free.

On the other hand, if a payment fails, you enter a 14-day grace period. During those two weeks, your plan stays fully active, and we will send multiple notices that the charge did not go through so you can update the card or switch payment methods. Stripe will also retry the card on its own schedule during that window. If nothing succeeds by the end of those 14 days, your plan goes back to free.

For crypto payment plans, there is no grace period in the same sense because there is no card to retry. Your plan will run through the date it was prepaid for, and at the end of that date, if you don’t renew, it will revert back to the free plan.

What reverts means

Whenever a plan ends, your account moves to the free plan. Your email address and inbox stay the same, and every single message, including the attachments, is preserved. Nothing inside your encrypted inbox is touched, and your encryption keys are also not touched. You can sign in the same day and look at your inbox exactly the same way you did the night before.

What changes are unlocked by the paid plan?

• If you have more aliases than the free plan permits, the extras will get paused.
• If you have a custom domain attached, those will also get paused.
• Templates and signatures past the free limit will also get paused.

We use the word “paused” instead of “deleted” deliberately, because that is what happens. In our system, the records will stay, but they are just flipped to a disabled state. The aliases will not be able to receive new mail, custom domains will stop signing outgoing mail, and templates will also stop appearing in the compose dropdown.

Mail that already arrived through a paused alias or a paused custom domain stays in your inbox.

What happens to your storage after it expires

Free accounts come with 10 GB of storage. If your paid plan had you using more than that, you do not lose those messages, and you will still see every email inside your inbox. What you cannot do is receive new mail past the free limit until you either delete some content or get back onto a paid plan.

Incoming mail to an account that is over the storage limit is deferred rather than being completely bounced. We kept the window generous on purpose, which gives you enough time to react and solve the billing problem.

We have never deleted a user’s stored mail to enforce a storage limit, and we will never do this.

Getting back where you were

If you subscribe to the same plan or to any plan that meets or exceeds the limits that you had paused resources under, those resources will come back on automatically. The aliases will turn back on, the custom domains will turn back on, and the templates will reappear. You do not need to recreate anything or contact support.

This is one of the reasons that we created the Disable and Restore flow instead of a delete-on-downgrade flow. Downgrades should always be reversible because people’s billing situations can fluctuate.

What you actually need to do

If your card fails, the only thing to do is update the payment method in settings before the grace period ends.

If you cancelled it on purpose and would like for it to stay cancelled, then no action is needed. The account will simply settle back onto the free plan whenever the paid period ends.

If you ever need any help, we are here to help. Shoot us an email at hello@astermail.org.