Cancelling without losing the archive

This is the only part of a switch that can destroy something permanently. Everything before it is recoverable — a bad instruction set can be rewritten, a rushed parallel period can be extended. Closing an account cannot be undone, and the thing it takes with it is the only copy of a year of work if you have not already made another one.

The whole subject is one sentence: access to the archive usually depends on the account being active. Every step below follows from that.

Cancelling and deleting are different things

Worth separating before anything else, because they are frequently confused and the consequences are not comparable.

Cancelling a subscription stops the billing. What happens to the account itself varies: commonly it reverts to a free tier, and commonly the history remains visible, sometimes with restrictions. Sometimes features you used to organise that history stop working, which makes it present but hard to navigate.

Deleting an account removes it. That is the irreversible one, it is usually irreversible immediately or after a short grace period, and there is no support request that recovers it afterwards.

You may not need the second at all. If your goal is to stop paying, cancelling is sufficient, and leaving a dormant free account in place is the cheapest possible insurance against having missed something in the export. The reasons to actually delete are wanting the data gone rather than the billing stopped — which is a legitimate goal, just a different one.

The order, and why each step is where it is

Do these in sequence. The order is the entire content of this post.

1. Generate the export last, not first. An export is a snapshot and never updates. The copy you keep should be made close to the end so it includes everything, which means after the parallel period, not before it.

2. Open the export and verify it. Unzip it, confirm the files are non-empty, search for a phrase from an old conversation, and check that one attachment actually exists rather than being merely referenced. Do this while the account is still active, because every problem you find here is fixable then and none of it is fixable later.

3. Copy out anything that lives only in settings. Custom instructions, saved prompts, the configuration of anything you built inside the product. These are frequently not in the export. Reading them out into a file you own takes minutes and cannot be done retrospectively.

4. Replace shared links. Any conversation link you gave a colleague, put in a document, or attached to a ticket stops working. Find them, replace them with the exported text, and tell whoever relies on them. This is the only step with someone else’s deadline attached.

5. Revoke integrations — in the other services. Authorisations the assistant holds against your storage, mail, calendar or code hosting do not expire because you cancelled. They are revoked from the other service’s connected-apps settings, not from the assistant’s. Closing the account without doing this leaves live grants behind.

6. Check what else the subscription covered. Some subscriptions bundle more than the assistant you were using. Confirm you are not cancelling something you still rely on.

7. Then cancel.

8. Only then, if you want it, delete. Ideally not the same day. A week of a dormant free account costs nothing and catches the thing you forgot.

What moves

WHAT MOVES — closing the account

  · Verified export, opened and checked
                    → yours permanently, independent of
                      the account

  · Custom instructions and saved prompts
                    → STAYS BEHIND unless copied out by
                      hand. Frequently absent from the
                      export.

  · Access to browse history in the product
                    → STAYS BEHIND on cancellation, in
                      whole or in part. Assume it does.

  · Shared conversation links other people
    hold
                    → STAYS BEHIND. They break, and you
                      will not be the one who notices.

  · Integrations granted to the assistant
                    → STAYS BEHIND live until revoked in
                      the other service.

  · Cancelling the subscription
                    → stops billing. Usually reversible by
                      resubscribing.

  · Deleting the account
                    → IRREVERSIBLE. Everything not already
                      copied out is gone, including things
                      you did not know were only there.

Billing details worth getting right

Two mechanics cause most of the avoidable annoyance, and both differ by provider — so treat these as things to check rather than facts.

Cancelling usually ends access at the end of the paid period, not immediately. Which means cancelling early in a cycle typically does not refund the remainder, and there is rarely a reason to cancel before the cycle is nearly over. Use the remaining days to finish the export properly.

Where you subscribed determines where you cancel. A subscription bought through a mobile app store is managed in that store’s subscription settings, not in the assistant’s account settings. Cancelling inside the product may do nothing at all to the billing in that case. This is the most common way people keep paying for something they believe they cancelled.

Both are worth verifying in your own account and receipts rather than assumed from any description, including this one.

The consumer subscription is not the API

If you also used the same provider’s API — for a script, a tool, a side project — that is a separate product with separate billing and separate data. Cancelling the consumer subscription does not stop API charges, and closing the consumer account may or may not touch API access.

If you have both, handle them as two independent cancellations, and check for a payment method still attached to the one you thought you were done with.

After it is closed

Put the verified export somewhere you actually back up, with a date in the filename, and note in the same folder what it is and which account it came from. In two years the archive will be useful and the context will not be obvious.

Then the switch is genuinely over. The thing worth keeping from it is not the archive — you will rarely open it — but the habit the process forced: instructions, prompts and reference documents now live in files you own rather than inside an account you rent.

That is the part that makes the next switch a paste instead of an afternoon.