Trash and version retention

This article covers what "retention" means, the per-tier day counts, what's reaped vs. what's permanent, the 14-day downgrade grace, and a few common questions about plan changes.

What retention covers

Retention is a single number per plan. It governs two things at once:

• Trash. Items you sent to Trash get permanently purged after the retention window passes since they were trashed. Until then, they're restorable from the Trash popover.
• Old version snapshots. Snapshots older than the retention window get reaped from storage, with one exception (see below). The reaper looks at every doc's full history and trims the back half.

The same number applies to both. If your plan's retention is 30 days, a doc trashed 30 days ago is eligible for permanent purge on the next sweep, and a version snapshot from 30 days ago is eligible to be reaped unless it's the most recent snapshot for its item.

The retention ladder

Plan	Trash + version retention
Free	7 days
Starter	30 days
Pro	60 days
Studio	90 days

Retiring plans (Base and AI, for early subscribers) mirror Pro at 60 days.

Free uses a 7-day trash and version-history window from the start. If a paid workspace moves to Free, the previous plan's longer window remains for a 14-day grace period before Free's 7-day window takes effect (see below).

What the reaper actually does

A background worker runs every hour and walks every workspace. For each one, it:

1. Resolves the workspace's effective retention window.
2. Permanently purges items whose Trash timestamp is older than the window.
3. Reaps version snapshots whose creation timestamp is older than the window, except the latest snapshot per item.

The latest snapshot per item is always kept. A markdown doc that hasn't been touched in two years still has its most recent version available, regardless of plan. See the version history article for the full guarantee.

What is never reaped

Three things the reaper never touches:

• Items that are still on a board. Retention only applies to items in Trash. A doc that's been sitting untouched on a board for two years stays on that board forever, regardless of plan.
• The latest version snapshot per item. Restore always has something to fall back to.
• Permanently deleted items. They're already gone by the time the reaper would look at them.

The 14-day downgrade grace

Plan changes happen in real time. The day you switch from Pro ($79) to Starter ($29) is the day your retention drops from 60 days to 30. Without a grace period, that would mean a doc trashed 45 days ago, which was safely restorable yesterday on Pro, is suddenly eligible for permanent purge today.

To avoid that cliff, every downgrade stamps a 14-day grace window on your workspace:

Concrete examples:

• Pro → Starter. For 14 days the reaper keeps using Pro's 60-day window. After that it switches to Starter's 30-day window. Anything you trashed in the last 60 days is restorable for those 14 days; you have time to either upgrade back or pull what you need out of Trash.
• Studio → Pro. For 14 days the reaper keeps Studio's 90-day window. After that it falls to Pro's 60-day window.
• Paid → Free (cancellation or downgrade). For 14 days the reaper keeps your old plan's window. After that it switches to Free's 7-day window. This is the biggest cliff the grace protects you from.

The grace fires automatically. There's nothing to click and no email to ask for. It's stamped by the same Stripe webhook that records the plan change.

Upgrades take effect immediately

There is no grace period in the other direction, and there doesn't need to be: upgrading is always good news for retention. The day you upgrade from Starter to Pro is the day your retention jumps from 30 days to 60 days. Items trashed up to 60 days ago that hadn't been reaped yet are protected going forward.

That said, upgrading does not resurrect already-reaped items. The reaper runs hourly, and once it's purged something the storage is gone. If you downgraded, waited two months past the grace, and only then upgraded back, anything the reaper already cleaned up isn't coming back.

Why we do this

Two reasons:

• Storage cost. Version snapshots are full copies of the doc taken every 10 seconds of editing. A heavily-used Studio team can accumulate gigabytes of snapshot history per month. Keeping all of that forever for every workspace would bake unbounded storage cost into the per-seat price. Retention windows let us offer a real version-history feature at a fair price.
• Predictability. A bounded window with a known cliff is easier to plan around than "kept for some unspecified amount of time, until it's not." If a doc is 60 days old on Pro, you know it's restorable today and you know it's not restorable in 61 days. No guessing.

What to do before a downgrade

If you're planning to downgrade and there are items in Trash you want back, restore them before the grace expires. The 14 days is plenty of headroom for most cases:

• Open Trash from the sidebar.
• Sort or scan for the items you want to keep.
• Restore each one to its original board.

Restored items go back into normal storage and count against the new (lower) tier's retention from that point forward only when (and if) you re-trash them.

Where to go next

• For the mechanics of sending things to Trash and restoring them, read Trash and restoring items.
• For how version snapshots work, read version history.
• For per-tier prices and what's included in each plan, read plans and pricing.