Cancellation and Frozen State

When your advisor subscription ends — whether by choice or due to a payment failure — your account enters a frozen state. Understanding what happens during and after this state helps you plan transitions for your clients.

What Triggers a Frozen State

Your advisor account becomes frozen in two situations:

1. You cancel your subscription — either immediately or at the end of your current billing period (depending on your cancellation preference)
2. A payment fails — if your payment method cannot be charged after standard retry attempts, your account is frozen

What "Frozen" Means

A frozen advisor account has the following characteristics:

| Feature | Frozen State | |---|---| | Your advisor dashboard | Read-only — you can view client data but cannot make changes | | Client connections | Active — you still see connected clients' data | | Client seats | All assigned seats end; each client receives an email and keeps Builder Pro for seven days before Starter unless another access source takes over | | New invites | Disabled — you cannot generate new invite links | | New seat assignments | Disabled — you cannot assign seats to new or existing clients | | Your own Policy Stack data | Fully accessible — your personal account is not affected |

The Client Impact

When your account freezes, every seat you've assigned ends at the same moment. Each client:

• Receives a seat-loss email with a 20% off coupon (ADVISOR_TRANSITION) for self-pay annual Builder Pro
• Sees a billing notice on next login walking them through the change
• Keeps Builder Pro for seven days, then continues on Starter if no self-pay subscription or other seat takes over
• Keeps all of their data — every policy, snapshot, asset, goal is preserved

Connections are not affected. Clients remain connected to your advisor account even during the frozen state — you can still view their data in read-only mode (subject to their data-sharing consent).

Payment Failure Specifically

If your account freezes due to a payment failure, Policy Stack retries the charge on standard intervals before freezing. You receive email notifications at each retry attempt.

If you update your payment method before all retries are exhausted, the charge succeeds and your account never enters the frozen state. Update your payment method in Settings > Billing.

Returning After a Freeze

If you resubscribe, your connections are intact and you can reassign seats immediately. A client still inside the transition window keeps Builder Pro; a client already on Starter keeps all data and returns to Builder Pro when a new seat is assigned, without another connection flow.

See Resubscribing After Cancellation for the full process.