What happens when a term ends

Your lease has one date on it: the day the term you have paid for runs out. It is on your billing page and on your machine's page. It moves forward only when a payment lands — nothing else advances it, and the database refuses any other way of writing it.

A payment fails

Nothing happens to your machine. It keeps running, nothing is deleted, the payment provider retries the card, and we email you. Your machine's page and your billing page both carry a warning while a charge is outstanding.

The term lapses: grace

When the date passes, the lease moves into grace and the machine keeps running. How long depends on how long you have been with us, measured from when the lease started:

• **1 day** in your first two months.
• **3 days** after two months.
• **14 days** once you have been with us three months.

The end of grace is a stored date, not a countdown your browser works out, and it is the date the warning on your pages prints. We email you when the renewal fails and again before grace runs out, and that message states the date and says to export anything you need.

Do not rely on the email as your only warning. A message that bounces is not retried today, so the date on your billing page is the thing to trust.

This clock has nothing to do with the 14-day withdrawal right in the refund policy. They are two unrelated things that are both fourteen days at their longest.

Grace runs out

Within about a minute of the stored time, all of this happens together:

1. The machine's ability to report anything to us is revoked.
2. The lease and the machine are unpaired, and your dashboard link is cleared.
3. **The machine's address is retired permanently.** That name will never point at a machine again.
4. The lease is over, and your access with it.

The disk is then wiped, and no machine is given to anybody else until that wipe is proven — the evidence we accept is a changed SSH host key, not a successful call to the provider. **We keep no copy and nothing can be recovered.** Paying again gets you a new machine, not this one.

Three things that do not exist

• **A suspended state.** Nothing powers your machine off and holds it intact while you decide. It runs, and then it is reclaimed.
• **A retention window after the term.** There is no period during which your data is still there and recoverable, on any plan, and there is not going to be one.
• **A snapshot taken before the wipe.** Getting your files off a machine is the whole of what is available, and it has to happen before the date.

Cancelling

Which answer you get depends on what you have already received, and it is decided when you press the button rather than by what the page you are looking at thought was true.

• **You have a machine, or have had one.** The renewal stops. The machine runs to the end of the term you paid for and its disk is wiped when it stops. Nothing is charged again and nothing is returned — the time you bought is time you had.
• **You are waiting for a machine and no payment succeeded.** The order is cancelled and nothing is owed either way.
• **You are waiting for a machine and you have paid.** The lease ends and the full amount comes back. It becomes account credit, or — if you paid by card and ask for it — a refund, which is a request a person executes rather than something the button reverses.

A term bought with account credit can only come back as credit; there is no card payment to reverse. Account credit is a running total of what was added and spent rather than a number somebody edits, so your balance and its history are the same record.

Credit itself is two different things depending on where it came from. Credit you **bought** is refundable while it is still unspent. Credit we **granted** you — a cancelled term coming back, or a goodwill entry — is not, because no money arrived for it. The refund policy states that rule; buying credit does not build a machine and does not start a term.