A company gets breached on a Tuesday. In the scramble, nobody notices that the card on file expired last month, or that the finance contact who receives the invoices left in June.
By the time someone thinks to restore from backup, the account is delinquent.
This is not a hypothetical edge case. Billing failures cluster around exactly the kind of organisational disruption that also causes data loss, which means a backup product's dunning policy is a data-loss policy whether it was designed as one or not.
What we do
Credit runs out and we warn you. At day seven new work stops: no new runs, schedules paused, and configuration stays editable so you can fix the setup while you fix the billing. At day thirty it goes read-only.
Downloads work at every rung. Nothing is deleted for a year.
Why "stopped" and "blocked" are different rungs
There is a distinction in the middle of that ladder worth explaining, because it came out of asking what a delinquent customer is actually trying to do.
At stopped, new runs are paused but configuration is still editable. That is deliberate. Someone whose billing has lapsed is frequently also mid-way through fixing whatever caused the disruption, and locking their configuration at that moment punishes the recovery, not the debt.
At blocked, nothing new is created or modified. Even here, every artifact that already exists is readable and downloadable.
7days
Before new work stops
30days
Before read-only
365days
Before anything is deleted
No late fees
No penalties, no interest, no reactivation charge. A late fee on an unpaid backup bill collects almost nothing and converts a lapsed customer into an angry one. Paying the invoice reverses the ladder from any stage.
The incentive problem, named
It is worth being direct about why this is not obvious. A backup vendor holding delinquent customers' data has enormous leverage, and the shortest path to collecting an unpaid invoice is to make the data hard to reach.
We think that is a genuinely bad thing to build, and the fact that it works is what makes it worth refusing on purpose rather than by omission.
Getting your data out is separate from paying for it
Availability is unconditional; the bytes are metered. Those two things are not in tension, and keeping them separate is what stops a billing state from becoming a custody question.
Your backups are yours. The invoice is a different conversation.