Downgrade preservation

This is the most important page in the help center after the mental model. Read it once, and you’ll have a permanent answer to the question “what happens to my work if I downgrade?”

The short answer: nothing is deleted. The long answer is a few paragraphs.

The trust contract

When you downgrade your plan, cancel your subscription, or pause your account, LingoVae never deletes your work. Instead, your styles, drafts, schedules, campaigns, and styled product descriptions enter a paused state. They stay in our database. They reactivate the moment you go back to a plan that covers them.

The principle we follow is called hibernate, don’t destroy: your work goes dormant, but it’s always recoverable.

This applies to:

Custom styles you’ve created (Pro feature)
Schedules and campaigns you’ve set up (Grow and Pro features respectively)
Bulk job history (Grow feature)
Reviewer accounts (Grow feature)
Version history (Pro feature)
Styled product descriptions that exceed your new plan’s allowances (e.g., products 11 through 247 if you downgrade Pro → Free)

It does not apply to:

Your original Shopify product descriptions — those are always yours, in Shopify, untouched.
Your transformation quota balance — quota resets monthly, so this isn’t really “paused,” it just becomes the new tier’s amount.
Active in-flight bulk jobs when you downgrade — these get cancelled, but everything generated so far stays in your review queue.

What “paused” actually looks like

Paused resources behave like this:

Custom styles appear in your library with a “Paused — requires Pro” tag. You can’t use them to generate new drafts, and they don’t render on the storefront. You can see and read them.
Schedules stop firing. The cron tick passes over them silently. Your storefront keeps showing whatever was active before the pause.
Campaigns stop matching. All visitors see your default styled version.
Styled product descriptions beyond your new plan’s allowance keep their data in our database, but the entitlement metafield that tells your storefront “use the styled version” expires. The theme block falls back to your original Shopify description automatically.
Reviewer accounts are revoked from the review queue but the user records persist.

If your plan upgrade later restores the capability, all of this comes back online.

What the storefront does during a downgrade

Your storefront notices the change within 24 hours via an entitlement metafield that LingoVae maintains. This metafield says “this store is on Plan X” and lists which styled products are still entitled to render.

For products under your new plan’s cap, the styled version keeps rendering.
For products over the cap, the entitlement metafield no longer lists them, so the theme block falls back to the original.

This happens at the theme/CDN layer, not via API calls to LingoVae. Your storefront performance is unaffected.

The reason it can take up to 24 hours is the entitlement metafield has an expiry of about that long. As soon as the existing metafield expires, the theme requests a new one and gets the updated entitlement. If you need the change to take effect sooner, you can manually trigger a refresh from Settings → Integrations → Refresh storefront entitlements.

Re-upgrading is asymmetric

This is the part that surprises people. Re-upgrading does not necessarily restore everything.

Example: You’re on Pro. You created 5 custom styles and 3 campaigns. You downgrade to Free for a few months. Then you re-upgrade to Grow.

What reactivates:

Schedules — Grow includes schedules.
Bulk job history — Grow includes bulk.
Styled descriptions for any product (Grow has no product cap).

What stays paused:

Custom styles — Grow does not include custom styles. They’re still in your library, still tagged “Paused,” still readable. They’ll reactivate when you re-upgrade to Pro.
Campaigns — Grow does not include campaigns. Still in your library, still paused.
Version history — Grow doesn’t include full version history. The history is preserved; you just can’t browse beyond the revert-to-original option.

The rule is: each paused resource reactivates only if your new plan covers it. Downgrading-then-re-upgrading to a different tier is not a round trip.

To get everything back, you re-upgrade to the same (or higher) plan you were on before.

The 90-day retention window

Paused resources stay in our database for 90 days from the date you downgraded or paused.

After 90 days, they move to an archived state. Archived resources still exist, but:

They’re not visible in the UI without contacting support.
They count as “in cold storage” for our purposes — we can restore them, but it’s a manual process.
They’re retained for 9+ months beyond the 90-day mark before being purged for GDPR compliance.

The clock does not reset on partial re-upgrade. If you go Pro → Free and stay there for 60 days, then re-upgrade to Grow, your custom styles still have only 30 days left on their original 90-day clock before they archive. The asymmetric re-upgrade reactivated some resources but didn’t refresh the dormancy timer for the rest.

To reset the clock on a paused resource, re-upgrade to a plan that fully reactivates it. Reactivation cancels the dormancy timer for that resource.

Pausing your subscription

Instead of downgrading or cancelling, you can pause your subscription for 1, 2, or 3 months. This is the right move for:

Seasonal businesses (pumpkin sellers, ski rental shops, holiday-only brands).
Sabbaticals or planned closures.
Cash-flow timing — “I want to keep my work alive but skip a couple of months of charges.”

How pausing works

Open Settings → Billing → Plans. Click Pause subscription. Pick a duration. Confirm.

Your subscription:

Stops charging immediately. No prorated refund for the current cycle; you’ve already paid through your current renewal date.
Locks features. The app shows a “paused” banner. You can browse your library, see history, look at settings — but you can’t generate drafts, run jobs, or publish.
Resumes automatically on the date the pause ends. You go back to whatever plan you were on, at the regular charge.

Your storefront during a pause

The exact same thing as a downgrade: the entitlement metafield expires after ~24 hours, and your storefront falls back to your original Shopify descriptions everywhere. Nothing visible to customers is destroyed; you can resume the styled experience instantly when you unpause.

If your store is closed to customers during the pause (e.g., you’ve disabled the storefront entirely), this is moot.

Resuming early

If you change your mind, you can unpause early from the same Plans page. Click Resume now and your plan kicks back in immediately. You’re billed prorated for the remainder of the current cycle.

Extending a pause

If your pause is about to end and you need more time, extend it from the Plans page. The same 1/2/3 month options apply. You can stack pauses indefinitely, but each one counts as a separate event for the retention timer.

When LingoVae will delete data

We retain everything you create for 9+ months from the date of last activity. After that, anything we haven’t already deleted is purged for GDPR compliance.

You can also explicitly delete:

A draft — manually discarding and clearing.
A style — manually archiving via the library page. Archived styles still exist; they’re only purged when you explicitly delete them from the archive.
The entire store’s LingoVae data — Settings → Legal → Request data deletion. This is irreversible and complies with GDPR’s right to be forgotten. We confirm via email; once you confirm, we have 30 days to complete the purge.

Uninstalling the app with the “Strip styling and revert” choice removes the styled metafields from Shopify but does not delete your LingoVae data — you can reinstall and have access to your library and history. Use the explicit data deletion request if you want a full purge.

The summary

Downgrades, pauses, and cancellations move work to paused, not deleted.
Pause is reversible by re-upgrade, but asymmetrically — only resources covered by the new tier reactivate.
Paused work has a 90-day retention window, then 9+ months in archive, then is purged.
The clock does not reset on partial re-upgrade.
Original Shopify product descriptions are never touched by any of this — they live in Shopify, always.
You can request explicit deletion at any time via Settings → Legal.