The trial, and what happens when it ends

The trial lasts 14 days from the moment you register, needs no card, and includes every feature. Two ceilings apply to how much it can send. When it expires the dashboard becomes read-only, sending and new signups pause, and your public website carries on exactly as it was.

Nothing is charged when a trial ends and nothing is deleted. There is no payment to cancel, because there was never a card, so an expired account waits rather than closing.

What starting a trial commits you to

Nothing. No card is taken, no plan is chosen and no charge happens at the end of the 14 days.

The trial is set on the account when it is created and counts calendar days from that moment. Everything you build during it is real: real issues to real subscribers, a real domain if you connect one, real sponsorship inventory. None of it has to be redone later, and none of it is a sandbox that gets cleared.

The two ceilings on trial sending

A trial may send 2,000 emails in total and 500 to any one issue.

The total counts recipients of issues sent since you registered, across every newsletter on the account, and it does not reset. Test sends to yourself are not counted, because only issue recipients are, so you can check an issue in your own inbox as often as you like. Both figures appear in the composer before you press send, on the billing page as a bar, and on a dashboard banner once half the total has gone. The limits on hosted sending are the ones that replace these the moment a subscription goes live.

What read-only actually blocks

Every write is refused, and every read is left alone.

Publishing an issue is blocked, editing anything is refused with a note saying the trial has ended, imports will not run, and the two scheduled emails Issue Mint sends on your behalf stop: the weekly digest and the one reminder to people who signed up without confirming. The dashboard itself still opens, and so does every page inside it.

New signups pause on the day it ends

The subscribe form on your website and any embedded form keep rendering, and stop accepting anybody.

A reader who tries is told that signups are paused for the moment. They are told nothing about billing, because whose trial has expired is none of their business. This is the one change a reader can see, so it matters most to anybody running ads or a launch while a trial is ending.

What carries on regardless

Your website, your archive, your data and every way of reading it.

The public site stays up on its own address, the archive stays published, the RSS feed keeps serving what you have already published, and tracking links inside issues already delivered keep resolving for readers who open an old one. Inside the dashboard, every issue report, your subscriber list and the CSV export of it all work, because a download is a read. Your own account settings sit outside the read-only rule entirely, so changing your password, editing your profile and signing out are unaffected, and the billing pages work normally, since subscribing is the way out. The archive website you get is the part readers see, and an expired trial does not touch it.

Subscribing part-way through, or afterwards

Subscribing lifts both sending ceilings and takes the dashboard out of read-only as soon as the subscription is live.

Checkout is set up so that a trial’s remaining days are kept: subscribing on day three of 14 days means the first payment falls on the day the trial would have ended, rather than that afternoon. Checkout also refuses a plan smaller than your current list and names the one that fits, which is worth knowing if you imported a list during the trial. The five plans sets out the ladder those figures come from.

Nothing is deleted at expiry

An expired trial keeps everything, indefinitely, and no timer in Issue Mint deletes a publisher’s archive.

The retention window and the deletion warning that follows it apply to a subscription that ran and then ended, which is covered in cancelling a subscription. An account that never subscribed at all sits read-only with its data intact, and subscribing months later brings it all back exactly as it was.