Inactivity and automatic deletion — Help

1pm eventually removes accounts that have been inactive for a long time. Trial accounts that never started a subscription become candidates after about two months of inactivity; cancelled paid accounts are kept much longer (around nine months). In every case you get four warning emails over a 60-day notice period, and then the account is deactivated rather than deleted: you lose access, but everything is still there and you get another 60 days to restore it yourself. Signing in at any point before that stops the whole process.

Two things decide whether an account is inactive: whether the billing has lapsed, and whether anyone has actually used it. Both have to be true. If you are still opening 1pm, you are not a candidate, whatever your subscription is doing.

This article explains why the policy exists, the exact timelines, what the warning emails look like, what deactivation means, 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 warning window and the deactivation step exist specifically so that "I might come back" is a thing you can act on (just sign in) rather than something we have to guess.

One group is exempt in practice: if you hold a seat on somebody else's 1pm account, you're never a candidate. Your own subscription isn't what pays for that seat, so a lapsed one says nothing about whether you're working.

The two thresholds

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

Trial-only account, never paid: 60 days of inactivity.

If you signed up for the 30-day free trial and never added a card, 60 days after your trial lapses your account becomes a candidate for deletion. That's a full month past the end of the 30-day trial, 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 venues 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 two ways at once, and both have to be met. The billing side is the end of your free trial if you never subscribed, or the end of your last paid period if you subscribed and then cancelled. The activity side is when the account was last used, which means an actual visit to 1pm, not a last email open or a password reset.

That second test matters more than it sounds. Staying signed in counts. 1pm keeps you signed in for weeks at a time, so plenty of people use it daily for months without ever typing a password, and it would be absurd to treat them as absent. If the account is being used, it is not a candidate for any of this, no matter what the subscription says.

Signing in during the warning window also clears a scheduled deactivation, and re-subscribing does the same.

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 will be deactivated in 60 days". The email names both dates (when you lose access, and when the data is actually deleted) and carries a single Sign in and keep my account button. Click it, 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 account is deactivated in 24 hours. If you ever miss the first three emails and only see this one, sign in: you still have time, and even if you miss this one too, deactivation is recoverable.

After T-minus 0 the account is deactivated. That is not the end of the story, and the next section explains what it means.

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.

You won't get a confirmation for this, and you don't need one: if you can sign in and use 1pm normally, the schedule is cleared. You'll also stop receiving the rest of 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 deactivation means

If you don't sign in during the warning window, the account is deactivated. This is the part most people never see, so it's worth being precise about it.

Nothing is deleted. Your events, crew, uploads and everything else stay exactly where they are.

You can't sign in and use 1pm. Try to, and instead of the dashboard you get a page that explains what happened and offers a Restore button.

You have 60 days to press it. One click and the account comes back with everything in it, no support request, no waiting on us.

Deactivation exists because emails are unreliable in ways nobody can control. They land in spam, they go to a work address you left two jobs ago, they get filtered as marketing, or they hit an inbox that has quietly been bouncing for a year. If all four warnings miss, being locked out of a working account is a message that cannot be filtered, and it arrives at the exact moment you care: when you try to use it.

Share links keep working. If crew or a client are relying on a live run of show or a shared BEO, deactivating your account doesn't pull it out from under them. Only your own access to 1pm stops. That changes at deletion, when the links go with everything else.

What happens at deletion

60 days after deactivation, if nobody has restored the account, the hard-delete runs and it 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, and that you had 120 days and five separate chances to stop it.

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. Using the account is itself the thing that keeps it, so the policy never fires.

If you're a seasonal venue that 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 (60 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 the app itself, live.1pm.app, on a device you use regularly. 1pm.app is the marketing site and visiting it proves nothing; the clock reads whether you have been in 1pm. A sign-in every few months is what clears a pending deactivation.
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 the full 120 days out.
The email is being sent to an inbox you no longer monitor regularly. Sign in at live.1pm.app, 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 live.1pm.app directly in your browser and sign in. Signing in is exactly what a real warning is asking you to do, so you lose nothing by ignoring the link and going there yourself. 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 flow: a 48-hour grace window where you can sign back in and Restore, then the deletion runs. See Deleting your 1pm account.

Both flows end at the same Restore page, but they give you very different amounts of room. A manual deletion gets 48 hours, because you typed your password into a confirmation box and said "do it now"; the two days are a buffer in case you change your mind overnight. The inactivity route gets 60 days of email warnings, then 60 more days of being locked out but restorable, because you never said anything at all and we may never have reached you.

Either way, once the hard-delete actually runs, there is no recovery and no backup.