Somebody decides they're done. Business closed, moved to a different builder, whatever the reason. They go into account settings, click delete account, and expect the same thing every close-your-account flow promises: a grace period, nothing lost right away, thirty days to change your mind before anything actually happens.
Half of that is true. The other half catches people off guard.
The moment you confirm account deletion, Cantrip cancels your subscription and takes every website you own offline. Not eventually. Immediately, as part of the same request. If your site is still the first thing a customer finds when they search your business name, that's worth knowing before you click confirm, not after.
What actually waits thirty days is the data, not the site. Your pages, posts, form submissions, and team stay in the database untouched for the full grace period. Log back in during that window, hit cancel deletion in account settings, and everything comes back exactly as it was: subscription restored, website live again. It's a real undo button, just not the kind that keeps your business visible while you're deciding.
Once the thirty days run out, a scheduled job deletes it for real. Every page, post, and media file goes, S3 files included. Team data goes with it. Your account row itself doesn't vanish completely: we keep an anonymized version (name replaced, email swapped for a placeholder, password cleared) purely so refund and billing history still hold up on our end if it's ever needed. Nobody's browsing your old content off that row. It's a receipt, not a backup.
If there's anything you actually want to keep, export it before you confirm deletion, not after. Account settings has a data export that bundles your pages, posts, form submissions, and site settings into a downloadable file. It exists because "we deleted it" and "we can get it back for you" aren't the same sentence, and once the grace period ends, only the first one is true.
None of this is a trick to make closing your account harder than it should be. It's the same tradeoff every real deletion flow makes: keep the data around long enough that a mistake doesn't wreck someone's business, then delete it instead of quietly holding onto it forever "just in case." We'd rather be upfront about which half happens on day one and which half waits until day thirty.