Inactivity and automatic deletion — Help

1pm automatically removes accounts that have been inactive for a long time. Trial accounts that never started a subscription are deleted after about three months of inactivity; cancelled paid accounts are kept much longer (around nine months) before deletion. In every case, the user gets four warning emails over a 60-day notice period before the deletion runs, and signing in at any point clears the schedule.

This article explains why the policy exists, the exact timelines, what the warning emails look like, and how to make sure you're never on the wrong end of it.

Why an inactivity policy exists

Three reasons we delete inactive accounts rather than holding them forever.

Storage and operational cost. Every account on the platform sits on backups, indexes, search infrastructure, and email lists. Multiplied across years of one-off sign-ups, the cost adds up. Auto-deletion keeps it sustainable.
Better hygiene for the people on each account. A dormant account is also a forgotten password, a stale email address, and a piece of personal data with no active owner. Removing it after a clearly-communicated window respects the user's right not to be carried indefinitely on someone else's database.
A cleaner product. If we never deleted, our system would gradually fill with abandoned events from three years ago, briefings for clients who long ago moved on, and contact details that are no longer accurate. The auto-delete keeps the live data set fresh and the contact lists honest.

The policy is the same for everyone. There's no exemption, no "but I might come back one day" exception. The 60-day warning window exists specifically so that "I might come back" is a thing you can act on (just sign in) rather than something we have to guess.

The two thresholds

There are two different deletion timelines depending on what kind of account you are.

Trial-only account, never paid: 90 days of inactivity.

If you signed up for the 30-day free trial and never added a card, after 90 days of not signing in your account becomes a candidate for deletion. 90 days is well past the point where a returning evaluator would reasonably expect their account to survive.

Cancelled paid account: 270 days of inactivity (about 9 months).

If you paid at least once (even one month of subscription) and then cancelled, the threshold is much longer. 270 days is chosen specifically to be just shy of a full year, which catches the annual-event cycle most planners run on. If you cancelled in January after running a December gala and you come back in October to start planning the next December's gala, your account is still there. If you don't sign in for nine full months, that's a different signal.

These thresholds are measured from your last sign-in (not last subscription change, not last email open). Signing in resets the clock to zero. So does re-subscribing.

The warning window: 60 days of notice

Once the system identifies you as eligible for deletion, a 60-day countdown begins. During that 60 days you receive four warning emails: at the start, halfway through, in the final week, and on the final day before deletion.

T-minus 60 days (the moment you become eligible).

Subject line along the lines of "Your 1pm account is scheduled for deletion in 60 days". The email explains the deletion window, when the deletion will run, and a single Sign in to keep my account link. Click the link, sign in, schedule cleared.

T-minus 30 days.

A halfway-through reminder. Same shape, shorter wording. If the first email got buried, this one is the second chance.

T-minus 7 days.

The final-week email. Worth taking seriously. After this email, you have a week to sign in.

T-minus 1 day.

The "tomorrow" email. The final notice that the deletion runs in 24 hours. If you ever miss the first three emails and only see this one, sign in immediately: you still have time to keep the account, but only just.

After T-minus 0, the deletion runs and the account is gone. Once it has run, there is no restore. The 60-day window is the only opportunity to keep the account.

How to clear the schedule

The deliberately simple part. Sign in to 1pm at any point during the 60 days.

That's it. You don't need to click a specific button, you don't need to email anyone, you don't need to do anything other than complete a normal sign-in. The system sees you sign in, treats that as proof you still care about the account, and removes the scheduled deletion. The next email in the warning series doesn't get sent. The clock starts over from your now-current last-sign-in.

If you signed in and want to confirm the schedule has been cleared, you'll know because there's no longer any deletion-notice banner on the dashboard, and you won't receive subsequent emails from the warning series.

Re-subscribing also clears the schedule. If you were on a cancelled paid account, paying again is treated as a stronger signal of intent than just signing in.

What happens at deletion

If you don't sign in during the warning window, the hard-delete runs and the account is removed. Specifically:

Your user account.
All your events, run-of-show timelines, briefings, statuses, and notes.
All crew records (contacts, tags, ratings, internal notes).
All requests, responses, and uploaded files.
All event attachments and links.
All branding themes.
All share links and tokens.
All historical activity associated with the account.

This is the same hard-delete that runs when a user explicitly deletes their account through the Account page; the difference is just that the trigger is inactivity rather than a manual confirmation.

If you were on a paid plan that you forgot about (the rare case where you cancelled but never quite finished cancelling, or the card declined and the subscription went dormant), the Stripe subscription is cancelled at the same time as the data wipe so you stop being billed.

There is no backup. We don't keep a copy of deleted accounts anywhere. If you sign up again later with the same email address, you start a fresh account.

How not to get auto-deleted

If you actively use 1pm, this article is theoretical for you. Your sign-ins are far more frequent than the thresholds, the policy never fires.

If you're a seasonal planner who steps away for a few months at a time, the cancelled-paid threshold (270 days) is designed for you. Don't cancel as a long-term storage strategy unless you're prepared to sign back in once or twice in those nine months. If you want to definitely not lose anything, keeping a paid subscription on pause (one of the cheaper plan options) is the firmest guarantee that nothing gets touched.

If you're a one-time user who tried 1pm once for one event a long time ago and never came back, the trial threshold (90 days) is the right policy for you to be subject to. You probably won't notice the deletion and that's a reasonable outcome.

If you're somewhere between, two things help:

Bookmark 1pm.app on a device you use regularly. Even a once-every-few-months sign-in is enough to reset the clock.
Keep the email address on your account current. The warning emails are the primary safety net. If your sign-up email goes stale, the emails bounce into the void and the first you know is the account being gone. See Changing your email in the Profile article for how to update.

If you get a warning email and don't know why

A warning email always shows the exact account it relates to (the email address it was sent to is the one being warned). If you don't recognise the account, possibilities:

You forgot you signed up. Sign in once, look around, decide whether you want to keep it. If you don't, you can delete it explicitly from the Account page rather than wait for the auto-delete to run.
The email is being sent to an inbox you no longer monitor regularly. Sign in (the email contains a direct link), update the email on your account from the Profile page so future emails reach you, and the clock is reset.
The email is a phishing attempt impersonating 1pm. Real warning emails come from the mail.1pm.app sender domain. If something looks off, don't click the link in the email: go to 1pm.app directly in your browser, sign in, and check whether the dashboard shows a deletion banner. If it does, you were genuinely scheduled. If it doesn't, the email was probably fake. Forward suspicious emails to [email protected].
You share an account with someone who actually uses it. The warning is on the account, not on the inbox; if multiple addresses receive the warning by being on the email's CC list or being forwarded, only the one on the account is the canonical recipient. If you're using a shared inbox, sign in.

How auto-deletion differs from manual account deletion

If you go to Account, Delete account, and confirm it yourself, that's a different (manual) flow with a 48-hour grace window where you can sign back in and Restore. See Deleting your 1pm account.

Auto-deletion has a much longer warning window (60 days vs 48 hours) but no Restore page. The difference: when you confirm a manual deletion you're explicitly saying "do it now"; the 48 hours is the safety buffer in case you change your mind. When you're auto-deleted, you didn't explicitly say anything: the 60-day window is the entire chance to weigh in. Once it ends, the deletion is final on the same terms.

Either way, after the hard-delete actually runs, there is no recovery.