What happens when your users downgrade or cancel their plan?
In my case, my pro plans offer the possibility to invite users to an organization, but I don't know what to do if the organization owner downgrade or cancel his plan. Should I delete his users (with all the data)?
I've found that one of the most important things to address up front with all users on the account is who owns the data. If you don't do this, there can be all kinds of problems later. The account getting cancelled is one, but also, it's very common for business owners to have disputes, employees to try to steal the account from the owner, etc. This is especially true with smaller businesses and it's a real pain to deal with each time (both sides of a dispute will be threatening you with legal action, etc.)
What we do to address this is each account has exactly one owner, which is the first person who signed up. When new users are added, they have to check a box saying that they acknowledge the other person is the owner. If they want, there's an option during that step to contact us and initiate an ownership change to the new user (like if an employee signs up originally, when the boss logs in the first time they'll ask us to make them the owner).
This way, every user on the account knows who the owner is, and they won't be surprised by the consequences. So if the owner cancels, no one can really get upset, you just cancel the whole account.
Another model I like is what Trello and Github do. Each user controls their own account, and the account is grated access to the organization. So if the owner cancels their plan, the user can no longer access the organization's data, but they still have their own personal account (this only makes sense if a user can be a part of multiple organizations, and especially if there's a freemium element).
As for whether to delete the data, you should probably define what you do in the terms of service or somewhere like that. In our case, we keep the data for a year in case they want to re-open the account (this is more common than you'd think) and then we delete it. Users can also request that we delete it immediately.
TL;DR it depends
Thank you very mucho for the feedback guys! I'm implementing now a functionality to deactivate users when downgrade, keeping all the data safe.
You should also clearly alert them that they won't be able to access those users data, or that you will permanently delete their data if they cancel their plan. This might warn them away from deleting an account.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago