Skip to content
← Help centre

Account and billing

What happens when a plan ends

Cancelling, a failed payment, and deleting your account all do different things to your access, your client links, and your data. Here is exactly what each one does and when.

Updated August 24, 2026 · 3 min read

Three different things can end a paid plan, and they behave differently. Nothing in any of them deletes your work.

You cancel

Cancelling does not cut you off that day. You keep everything your plan includes until the end of the period you have already paid for, and a banner across the top of the app tells you the date that happens.

When that date passes, your account becomes read-only. A second banner appears to tell you, because the change is easy to miss otherwise. Nothing is deleted.

A payment fails

A failed payment does not end your plan. You keep full access while we retry, and you will see a banner asking you to update your card. This grace period is deliberate: a card that expired over a weekend should not take your client portals down with it.

Update your billing details and the banner clears itself.

You delete your account

Deleting cancels your subscription first, then removes your account. If we cannot reach the payment system to cancel, the deletion stops and tells you, rather than leaving you with a subscription still billing and no account left to manage it from.

This is the one action that does remove your data. It cannot be undone.

What read-only means

Your projects, products, templates and photos all stay exactly where they are. What changes is what you can do next.

You can view and navigate everything you already made. You can open projects, specs, boards, change orders, order sheets and manuals. You can also manage your billing and account details.

You cannot change project content. Creating, editing, generating, archiving, restoring and deleting project content are all blocked. Account deletion remains available if you want to erase the account itself.

Your exports remain available. Project PDF, CSV and JSON exports still work. The whole-account JSON export in Settings is a complete structured-data export of supported project and account records. It includes stored file URLs or references, but it does not bundle images or generated PDFs. Download those files separately before deleting your account. Spec-sheet PDFs use the watermark and monthly cap shown for an account without paid access.

Existing public links and portals stay live. Ending paid access never automatically disables a client share, trade package, published home manual, product link, or other existing token portal. Clients and trades can keep using links already sent to them. The read-only wall limits the account owner's editing; it does not turn customer or trade portals off.

Published work remains under your control. Retraction stays available while the account is read-only. To take something offline:

  • Open the project sharing control and choose Revoke for its client share.
  • Open Boards and unpublish a selection board.
  • Open Trade packages, choose the package, and select Revoke.
  • Open the project's Home manual and select Revoke.
  • Open the product in Products, find Shared links, and choose Revoke link.

The affected link stops resolving after you revoke, disable, or unpublish it. Deleting the related content or deleting the account also ends its links.

Getting access back

Checkout alone is not confirmation. Owner editing returns after Stripe confirms the subscription to the account, normally within a minute. The Billing page refreshes automatically while confirmation is pending.

If the account is still read-only after a minute, refresh the page. If the confirmed plan still does not appear, contact info@specsheetbuilder.com. We reply within 2 business days. Existing public links stay live throughout, so there is nothing to republish.