Seat Expiration and What the Client Sees

When a seat ends — because you revoked it, you downgraded your plan, or your advisor subscription lapsed — the client keeps Builder Pro for a 7-day transition window. Their account and data stay in place. They're shown a notification and offered a 20% off coupon to continue with self-pay Builder Pro before the account continues on Starter.

This article walks through every way a seat can end and exactly what the client sees in each case.

When a Seat Ends

A seat can end in four ways:

1. You revoke the seat manually — from the client's profile or the Seats dashboard. Takes effect immediately. See Revoking a Seat.
2. You downgrade your plan and the new tier's capacity (included + overflow) can't fit your current assigned clients. Your newest assigned clients (ordered by when each seat was assigned) lose their seat at renewal. The Change Plan modal surfaces this as "Clients affected" before you confirm — see Changing Your Practice Tier.
3. Your advisor subscription is cancelled — every assigned seat ends when the current period closes.
4. Your subscription payment fails — once your account enters Frozen, assigned seats end at the same time. See Frozen State and Reactivation.

What the Client Sees

The client receives an email immediately when their seat ends. Downgrade-driven email uses An update about your Policy Stack access; other seat-loss messages identify the 7-day Builder Pro grace period. The messages explain why access changed, confirm that the data is safe, and offer a 20% off coupon (ADVISOR_TRANSITION) for self-pay annual Builder Pro. The CTA links to /settings/billing with the coupon pre-applied.

On their next login, a blocking modal walks them through the change and clears once they acknowledge it.

What Happens to Their Plan

• 7-day transition. Builder Pro remains active for seven days after the seat ends. The released seat can be reassigned immediately; the temporary access comes from the transition window, not from an assigned seat.
• Account stays. Every policy, snapshot, loan, asset, and goal is preserved. Nothing is deleted.
• Starter after day 7. If no other access source takes over, Starter provides one editable policy with its policy loans, 250 MB storage, Help Mode, and the Policy Loan Repayment Modeler. Additional policies plus asset and goal records stay stored but become view-only or locked. AI Insights stop generating.
• If they already had self-pay Builder Pro. Their own subscription takes over seamlessly. No change in access.

What Happens to Your Connection

The connection between you and the client is independent of the seat. When the seat ends, your connection persists — the client appears in your practice with a Connected badge (no Seated badge). To remove the relationship entirely, you also need to disconnect — see Seat Expires but Connection Stays.

Reassigning the Seat

Once a seat is released back into your pool, you can reassign it to another client immediately. No waiting period.

Advisor Notifications

You receive notifications when an assigned seat is approaching its expiration date (if you set one):

• 30 days before: Heads-up to plan ahead — extend the seat, prepare the client for transition, or reassign.
• 7 days before: Urgency reminder with a direct link to seat management.
• Day of expiration: Confirmation that the seat has returned to your pool and the email was sent to the client.

You can customize these notifications in Settings → Notifications under the Seat & Billing category. If you use no-expiration seats, you can disable seat expiry notifications entirely.

Extending a Seat

You don't need to revoke and reassign to change an expiration date. From your Seat Management dashboard, click the expiration date on any assigned seat to open the editor. You can:

• Push the expiration date forward (extend)
• Set a new date
• Remove the expiration entirely (seat never expires)

Letting Clients Know Ahead of Time

For downgrade-driven seat ends, the Change Plan modal tells you the number of clients who will lose their seat at renewal. A short heads-up message before the renewal date avoids surprise — the system email is matter-of-fact but a personal note still lands better.