Changing Plans and Downgrades

Three different things get confused with one another, and they have three different outcomes. Switching plans moves you between paid plans on the subscription you already have. Canceling ends the subscription at the end of the period you have paid for. A payment failing is neither — it is a retry window in which you keep your plan. Pick your situation below; the rest of the page then covers what happens to your data, your published site and your status badge.

Switching between paid plans

Select Switch toon the card you want. The plan changes on your existing subscription; nothing is re-purchased, and the entitlements move as soon as the payment provider confirms the change.

• On a paying subscription, the change is applied and invoiced immediately, with the provider working out the proration between the two plans.
• Mid-trial, the switch does not end the trial and does not bill you on the spot. The plan changes now; the first charge still lands at the end of the trial.

There is one durable consequence of switching mid-trial: the new plan is recorded as trialled too. Move from Starter to Growth during a Starter trial and both plans are now in your workspace’s trial history, so a future Growth checkout will not offer you a trial either. Free plan and trials has the full rule.

Going back to Free

The Free card carries a Downgrade to Free button whenever you are paying. It opens a confirmation dialog that states the consequence plainly:

Downgrade to Free Your subscription will be canceled. Contacts above the Free limit will lock until you upgrade again, and marketing email will be disabled.

The dialog’s two buttons are Keep my plan and a red Confirm downgrade.

What happens to your data

This is the section most worth getting exactly right, because the honest answer is calmer than most people expect.

Nothing is deleted

A downgrade removes access, never records.

• Contacts above the new limit lock. They are still captured, still counted and still stored; they are withheld from lists, search, segments, groups and exports until you upgrade. Usage and limits describes exactly which contacts lock and why it is the newest ones.
• Analytics history stays in place. Retention is enforced only as a cutoff at query time, so a narrower window hides data rather than deleting it. Nothing is ever purged.
• Transcripts and extracted document text remain stored. They are stripped out of responses below Starter, and the flag saying a transcript exists survives — which is why an asset can tell you a transcript is there and still not show it.
• Pages, assets, forms, menus, submissions, page types and labels are untouched.

Every one of those reverses the instant you upgrade again, with no reprocessing, no re-import and no rebuild of your data.

What is grandfathered

Some things you created while paying keep working after you stop.

• Content-level access overrides. Page-type and label overrides created on a paid plan keep applying. Below Starter you cannot create new ones, but the existing ones keep enforcing and you can always remove them. Per-page overrides are never plan-gated at all — resource-level access overrides draws the line.
• Distribution channels. A channel that is switched on and now sits above your plan can still be switched off, and deleting one always works on every plan. That is deliberate: the disable and delete paths are left open precisely so a downgrade is cleanable. See page workflows.
• Your custom theme names. A stored custom theme, code theme or font name keeps rendering. Only changing to a new custom value needs Starter.

What stops immediately

• Marketing sends. On Free the allowance is zero, so the send path refuses before anything queues.
• New gated writes — creating a campaign, a short link, a dynamic CTA, a new content-level access override, a new distribution channel.
• Gated analytics metrics: video and audio engagement, element and menu clicks, and full-journey attribution stop returning results and start returning an upgrade error. Capture continues on every plan, so the history is intact and reappears on upgrade.
• Everything in the next section, on your published site.

What your visitors see

This is the seam people forget. Gated behavior on your published site reads your workspace’s plan on every request, so a plan change takes effect on your live site immediately, without a republish.

• Live documentation search starts returning nothing to readers below Starter — the endpoint answers 404 so the surface looks absent rather than broken. See live documentation search.
• Recommendation blocks return an empty list and render nothing. See recommendations.
• Dynamic CTA slots return an empty payload and stay blank.

Two things change on a slower clock, because they are baked in when the site is built rather than read per request: the “Powered by Leed” footer badge and auto-linking. Changing plan queues a rebuild of your site, and those two flip over when that build completes — see how publishing works. A negotiated change made outside the normal billing path applies to your site at its next publish instead.

When a payment fails

The two surprising facts here are the whole reason this section exists: Past due keeps your plan, and Paused does not.

• Past due means a renewal charge failed and is being retried. Your workspace keeps its full entitlements throughout. Nothing degrades while the retry window runs.
• If the retries are exhausted, the subscription goes Unpaid and the workspace drops to Free entitlements at once.
• Paused means payment collection has been paused. The customer is not paying, so paid entitlements are withheld immediately — Paused behaves like Free, not like Past due.

Status reference

stateDiagram-v2
    state "Trial — your plan" as Trial
    state "Active — your plan" as Active
    state "Past due — your plan, retained" as PastDue
    state "Cancelled — your plan until the period ends" as Cancelled
    state "Paused — Free entitlements" as Paused
    state "Unpaid — Free entitlements" as Unpaid
    state "Expired — Free entitlements" as Expired

    [*] --> Trial: checkout, plan not trialled before
    [*] --> Active: checkout, plan already trialled
    Trial --> Active: trial ends, card charged
    Trial --> Cancelled: you cancel
    Active --> Cancelled: you cancel
    Active --> PastDue: renewal charge fails
    PastDue --> Active: payment recovers
    PastDue --> Unpaid: retries exhausted
    Active --> Paused: collection paused
    Paused --> Active: collection resumes
    Cancelled --> Expired: paid period ends
    Expired --> [*]

What each badge looks like on the Subscription panel, and where the order history sits beside it, is on invoices and payments.

What a downgrade does, item by item

Coming back

Upgrading restores everything in the same instant. Locked contacts unlock, the analytics window widens over data that never went anywhere, transcripts reappear, gated screens stop rendering prompts, and the next build removes the footer badge and re-applies auto-linking. Nothing has to be re-imported or re-processed, because nothing was removed.

Canceling, switching and updating a card all start from the same screen: managing your subscription.