What happens to your time data when you stop paying

6 October 2026 · 5 min read

Every vendor will tell you what you get when you buy. Far fewer will tell you what you keep when you leave.

It is a fair question to ask before you put a year of your company's hours into somebody else's product, and it is usually answered with a sentence vague enough to mean anything. Here is the specific answer for Happy Tracker, written down so you can hold us to it.

Nothing happens on the day it expires

A Happy Tracker plan is a single payment covering twelve months. When those twelve months are up, there is a seven-day grace window. During it the workspace carries on exactly as before — people clock in, screenshots are taken, reports run. Nobody is locked out mid-afternoon because a date passed.

That window exists because renewals get missed by ordinary human reasons: the person who paid last year has left, the finance email went to a filter, somebody is on leave. None of those are a reason to stop a team working.

After that, the workspace becomes a free one

It does not close, and it does not go read-only forever. It falls back to the free plan — the same plan anybody can sign up for without a card:

• Up to five people, with no time limit.
• Unlimited projects.
• Time tracking, timesheets, the project board and reports, all still working.
• Screenshots kept for three days; activity data for seven.

If your team is larger than five, the extra people cannot clock in until you either buy another year or reduce the workspace to five. That part is a real limit and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What you keep

The things that took your team a year to produce stay where they are:

• Every time entry — start, stop, project, client, task, and who recorded it.
• Projects, clients and tasks, with their full history.
• Timesheets and approvals, including which manager approved what.
• Invoices already raised from tracked hours.
• Leave records and attendance.

None of that is deleted when a plan lapses. The job that clears old data only ever touches screenshots and activity blocks — it has no instruction that can reach a time entry, a project or an invoice.

What ages out

Screenshots and activity data are the exception, and the reason is storage rather than policy. Every plan has a retention window, and the free plan's is the shortest:

• Free — screenshots 3 days, activity 7 days
• Starter — 7 and 10
• Pro — 15 and 15
• Business — 15 and 30

So a workspace that drops to the free plan keeps only the last three days of screenshots. The hours those screenshots belonged to are untouched; it is the images that go. If screenshots from a particular month matter to you — a client dispute, an audit — download them before the plan ends rather than after.

Why this never arrives as a surprise

Happy Tracker does not renew automatically. There is no stored card, no silent charge on the anniversary, and no cancellation flow to find. A plan ends because you decided not to buy another one, which means the only way to arrive at the free plan is deliberately.

That is unusual enough to be worth saying plainly. Most products in this category are the other way round: easy to start, automatic to renew, and awkward to leave. We would rather be chosen again each year than rely on somebody forgetting.

There is also a seven-day refund on any payment, including a renewal. If you pay and change your mind within a week, you get all of it back.

What to do before a year ends

Three things, and they take about ten minutes:

• Run the reports you will want later — time by project, by person, by client — and keep the exports.
• Download any screenshots that back a disputed or audited period.
• Decide on seats. If you will come back under five people, nothing else is needed.

Then let it lapse if you want to. The workspace is still there, the history is still there, and buying another year puts everything back exactly as it was.

The short version

Seven days of grace, then a free workspace. Your hours, projects, timesheets and invoices stay. Screenshots and activity data shrink to the free retention window. Nothing renews on its own, and any payment is refundable for seven days.