Cancelling your subscription

Cancelling happens in the billing portal, and the plan then runs to the end of the period you have already paid for. Nothing changes until that date. After it, the account goes read-only, your public website stays up, and your data is kept for at least 60 days.

Issue Mint deletes nothing on a timer. What arrives after the retention window is an email, not a deletion, and the section on it below says exactly what that email does and does not promise.

Where cancelling happens

Open the billing page, choose “Manage payment and invoices”, and cancel in the portal Stripe serves. Issue Mint has no cancel button of its own.

Cancelling takes effect at the end of the current period rather than immediately, so there is nothing to reverse if you change your mind that afternoon: resubscribe before the date and no interruption ever happens. From the moment you cancel, your billing page names the date your plan runs to and says that your website and data are kept afterwards. Issue Mint’s own email about it arrives when the plan actually ends, and it is the one that sets out the retention window below. Payments and invoices covers the rest of what that portal handles.

Until the period ends

Everything works normally, including sending. You can publish issues right up to the last day.

New readers can still sign up, imports still run, sponsorship enquiries still arrive, and the plan does not drop to something smaller in the meantime. A cancellation is a decision about the next payment rather than a switch that turns things off, so the fortnight after cancelling looks exactly like the fortnight before it.

After the period ends

The account becomes read-only. Sending stops, new signups pause, and changes are refused. Everything you can read stays readable.

Your dashboard opens, every issue report is still there, your subscriber list is intact and its CSV export still downloads. On the public side, your archive website stays up on its address, the RSS feed keeps serving what you have already published, and tracking links inside issues you have already sent keep resolving for readers who open an old one. The shape of this is the same as an expired trial, and what expiry changes lists it in detail.

The retention window

Your website and your data are kept for at least 60 days after the plan actually ends.

The clock starts on the day the plan ran out, not the day you clicked cancel, so cancelling early in a billing period does not shorten it. Issues, drafts, the archive, the subscriber list, sponsorship records and analytics are all held as they were, and resubscribing at any point in the window brings the account straight back with nothing to restore and nothing to set up again.

The email after the window

When the window has passed, Issue Mint sends one email saying so, and that email names no deletion date.

It says what is true: the window has gone by, everything is still here, and data is removed by hand rather than on a schedule. Nothing in the product destroys a publisher’s archive automatically, which is why the email does not pretend to a countdown that does not exist. It offers two things instead, resubscribing to get the account back as it was, and a copy of your subscribers and issues as files if you would rather have those and be done. Asking for the copy is a reply to the email.

Because removal is a deliberate act rather than a timer, the honest version is also the unhelpful one: after the window your data may be removed at any point, and it may sit there for months. If you want a copy, the safe moment is now rather than later.

Coming back

Resubscribing is choosing a plan on the billing page, exactly as it was the first time.

Read-only lifts as soon as the subscription is live, hosted sending resumes with no setup, and your next issue goes out from the same address it did before. The plan you need is decided by your list as it stands on that day, so a list that grew or shrank while you were away lands you on the rung that fits it, at the price on the ladder for that rung.