What happens to your files when you stop paying

Cancelling a subscription should be a decision about money, not a race against a deletion job. So on Nemi the day your paid plan ends is the day a clock starts, not the day anything disappears. Everything you already have gets 30 more days, counted from that day, whether you uploaded it last week or two years ago.

This post is the whole rule, with nothing left for small print: when a file is deleted on the free plan, what you can still do while your account is over its limit, and when you will be told. The calculator below runs the same function the product runs, so the date it shows is the date the product would act on.

When is a file deleted after I cancel?

Paid plans never delete a file because of its age. The free plan does: a file is deleted 30 days after it was uploaded, or 30 days after a paid plan ended, whichever is later. Those two halves cover the two kinds of free account. Somebody who has always been on the free plan sees each file go a month after it arrived. Somebody who used to pay gets one shared deadline for everything they stored while paying, a month after the plan ended.

Try putting the upload a year before the plan ended. The file is not deleted a year early, and it is not deleted the moment the plan ends either: it gets the same 30 days as a file you uploaded the day before you cancelled. Now put the upload after the end. That file arrived on the free plan, so it is treated like any other free file and gets 30 days from its own upload.

Why count from the end of the plan?

Because the 30 days are a property of the free plan, and they only make sense for time spent on it. A file you uploaded while paying was stored under a plan that promised to keep it. Measuring the free plan's window from that file's upload date would apply the rule to months it never covered, and the result would be that the most loyal customers, the ones with the largest archives, lose the most on the day they leave.

The free plan's window starts when the free plan does, never earlier.

Counting from the later date also makes the deadline legible. A person who has just cancelled has one date to remember for everything they stored, and the banner, the emails and the files themselves all say the same one. Dates are worked out in UTC and printed the same way everywhere, so a mail sent overnight and a banner in a browser two time zones away never name different days.

What can I still do while I am over the free limit?

Most people who leave a paid plan are holding more than the free plan fits. What each plan holds, and why a workspace follows the plan of the person who owns it, is set out in plans and limits in a workspace. For as long as that is true, the account cannot store anything new: uploads, and anything else that stores new files, are refused. That block is firm, because the alternative is quietly charging a free account for storage it does not have.

Everything that lets you get out from under it keeps working, without exception. Those are the ways out, and a block on any of them would turn a limit into a trap.

When an upload is refused, the sentence depends on who is reading it. The owner of the account is owed the date and the numbers. A colleague in their workspace is owed the name of the plan that refused them, so they do not go and buy an upgrade for their own account that changes nothing here. And a client using an upload link is owed none of it.

When will Nemi tell me?

Three times, by email: when the plan ends, seven days before the deletion date, and the day before it. A banner in the app carries the same date until it passes, and in the last week the files that are going say so on their own tiles. Two details make the emails trustworthy rather than noisy. If the reminders are late for any reason, you get the one that is true today, not all three an hour apart. And they are only sent while there are files that date will actually remove, so somebody who has already downloaded and cleared everything is not told about a deadline that no longer applies to them.

How do I keep my files?

Either subscribe again before the date, which lifts the upload block and cancels the deletion at once, or take your things out of Nemi Files with you. The second is easiest while you are still on the paid plan, so do it before you press cancel rather than after.

1. 1

   Download your files and folders

   Select them and download. A folder or several files come down as one zip, built while it downloads.
2. 2

   Export documents and spreadsheets

   Open each one and export it.
3. 3

   Decrypt and download any vault folders

   Only you hold the key to a vault, so nobody can recover one for you after the date.
4. 4

   Then cancel, or keep the plan

   In Settings, open Plan & Billing, press Cancel subscription and confirm. Your plan keeps working until the end of the period you paid for. The help page on cancelling and your files has the detail.

Photos in Gallery are not removed by this clean-up; on the free plan its photo and resolution caps apply to new uploads instead. The exact free limits are on the pricing page, the trash and expiry rules in the help centre, and the same retention rules, stated as commitments, in our privacy policy. If you are taking a lot with you, how Nemi builds a zip while it downloads explains why a large folder starts at once, and what encrypted at rest means covers how what you leave behind is stored until the date.