Cancelling and closing

Before you do anything

Your files are not here. They are on your own storage, reached by your Storage Connector. Cancelling an SFTP.cloud subscription does not delete, move or touch a single file. Whatever you decide, your data stays where it is.

What you lose when a site closes is the service in front of it: the address, the certificates, the user accounts and their credentials, the share links, and the site configuration.

Cancelling a subscription

On the site's Plan and billing page, choose Cancel subscription.

• Your site stays fully available until the end of the period you have already paid for.
• On that date it closes.
• You can resume at any time before then, keeping your plan, your price and your data exactly as they are.

You may be shown an offer first. Looking at it cancels nothing; closing that window leaves your subscription exactly as it is.

Cancelling a trial site

A site still on its free trial has a simpler exit: on its Plan and billing page, choose Cancel trial site and type the site's name to confirm.

• The site stops serving immediately. Its configuration and its users are removed, and its name becomes available to anyone again.
• Nothing was charged and nothing will be.
• Your files are not touched; they were never on SFTP.cloud.
• The free trial applies only to the first site of an account. Cancelling the trial site does not make another free trial possible; a future site on this account starts with a plan.

What to do before the end date

1. Tell your users. They will lose access on that date, and their clients will simply stop connecting.
2. Export anything that lives only in SFTP.cloud. That is a short list: your Activity log and your evidence file. Download the evidence file if you may ever need it; it is the record that proves what your machines did.
3. Note your SSH host key fingerprint if you plan to stand up a replacement and want to explain the change to partners.
4. Decide what happens to your Connector. It keeps running and keeps its configuration. If you are done with it, uninstall it. See Install on Linux or Install on Windows for the uninstall step.

Deleting an unpaid site

A site ordered but never paid for can be deleted outright from Plan and billing: I changed my mind, delete this site. Nothing has been charged, the site and its order are deleted immediately, and its name becomes available to anyone.

This cannot be undone. Unpaid orders are also cleaned up automatically after 7 days.

Closing your whole account

Cancelling a subscription ends one site. Closing your account ends everything.

On Account settings an administrator will find Close account. It walks you through four steps and nothing happens until the last one: leaving the page at any point cancels the whole request, and there is no saved draft, so coming back later starts again from the beginning.

What the walk shows you, from your own account rather than from generic wording:

1. What closes. Your sites, by name, and the subscriptions that are cancelled. Both stop immediately.
2. Your credit. Any unused account credit, as a figure, and the statement you are asked to accept: it is forfeited in full, it has no cash value, and it does not come back if you subscribe again.
3. Your data. Whether you also want us to erase what we hold about you. If you do, you are shown exactly which categories are erased and which are kept, with the reason for each, before you confirm.
4. Confirm. You type your organization name and prove it is you with your authenticator code or a recovery code. A password alone is not enough, and neither is being signed in.

Three things are worth knowing before you start:

• The remainder of a period you have already paid for is not refunded.
• Any unpaid invoice remains due.
• A dedicated server is released immediately and cannot be recovered. If you reopen the account later and buy again, you get a new one, with a new address and a new SSH host key.

Your files are not affected. They were never here. They live on your own storage, reached through your own Connector, and closing your account does not touch a single one of them.

After closing

You can still sign in. Everything is readable and nothing can be changed: invoices, your activity trail and your uptime records stay where they are. An administrator sees a Reopen account button, and reopening lets you buy again. It does not bring back closed sites, cancelled subscriptions or forfeited credit.

If you asked for erasure

Your accounts, sites, transfer users, connector records and support consents are erased, and the email addresses they held are released, so they can be used to sign up again later.

Some records are kept, and you are told which, and why, before you confirm:

• Invoices and payment records, because tax and accounting law requires it.
• Your activity trail. Every entry in it is also written into a signed chain witnessed outside this platform, and removing entries from the one is exactly what that pair exists to detect in the other. The erasure takes the identities rather than the entries: what remains names internal identifiers that no longer resolve to a person.
• The monthly availability decisions behind any service credits, because the Service Level Agreement promises they can be re examined. Your name comes off them.
• Your support conversations are cleared from our support desk by a person rather than automatically, because that desk serves every Syncplify product and we will not delete a record belonging to a different relationship by accident.

We email you a receipt when it is done. Keep it. Once your account is gone, it is the only thing tying that request to us.

Closure after nonpayment

If a subscription lapses rather than being cancelled deliberately, it follows a schedule with email warnings at every step. The full table is on Plan and billing.

The summary: full service to day 14, new sign ins refused from day 15, suspended at day 30, dedicated servers released at day 45, closed at day 90. Any state before closed returns to active the moment the payment succeeds.

After a site closes

Your site's configuration is retained for a period after closure, then deleted. Its dedicated server, if it had one, is released.

Your Activity log is kept, and outlives both the site and the account. It is mirrored into a signed chain witnessed outside this platform, and deleting entries is exactly what that pair exists to detect.

Your files remain untouched on your own storage throughout, and after.

Coming back

While the site still exists, Reinstate on Plan and billing restores service.

Once a site has been reaped, its name is released and anybody may take it. Coming back then means a new site, a new name, and new usernames for your people.