Free plan limits & deactivations

Production use of the Free plan is discouraged

Our Free plan is primarily intended for testing and prototyping DatoCMS projects before production deployment on a paid plan. Although the free plan can also be used for small projects that see minimal real-world traffic, we generally do not recommend this approach because the free plan is subject to deactivations.

Why was my project deactivated?

Projects on the free plan are subject to two types of automatic deactivation or deletion:

• Its monthly resource limits have been reached, resulting in temporary project suspension until the 1st of the following month

• The project owner has not logged in for 12 months (365 days), resulting in project and account deletion after several email warnings and a cautionary deactivation

Paid plans in good standing are not subject to these deactivations or deletions. Instead, paid plans incur pay-as-you-go resource overage charges according to the details of each plan.

Monthly resource limits & temporary project suspension

If a Free Plan account hits one of the monthly resource limits (bandwidth, API calls, etc.), all of its projects will be suspended for the remainder of the calendar month.

Suspension means that all admin UI, API, and asset CDN access will be disabled. You will not able to edit your projects, and any frontends connected to them will no longer be able to query their APIs or access their images, videos, and files over the CDN.

The limits will automatically reset on the 1st day of the next month and access will be automatically restored then as well.

What if I need to restore access to a deactivated project?

The easiest and quickest way to restore access to a deactivated project is to upgrade the owner's account to any paid plan. On a monthly plan, you can downgrade back to a Free plan at any time, as long as you remain within the limits of the Free plan.

This means you can upgrade to a paid plan for just a month if you are expecting a traffic spike, then downgrade again after that.

In exceptional circumstances, if your project was deactivated due to factors outside your control and a paid upgrade isn't an option, please reach out to DatoCMS Support for help.

Inactive account deletion

To help conserve resources, we periodically clean up unused accounts. Free accounts that have not logged in to their project or dashboard within the most recent 12 months (365 days) are subject to automatic deletion.

Email warnings

We send several email warnings to the account owner* before deletion:

• 365 days of no login activity: First email warning sent to account owner.

• +30 days later: All projects are deactivated (not deleted yet). Second email warning sent.

• +60 days later: Third email warning sent.

• +61 days later: Fourth and final email warning sent.

• +62 days later: Account and all of its projects are deleted.

* These emails are sent only to the account owner on file, not any of the project collaborators.

Preventing inactive account deletion

To prevent deletion, the account owner can simply login to their dashboard or a specific project at any time prior to deletion. The login must be from the account owner, not any of the collaborators inside a project.

What if the account owner cannot be reached or changed?

In some situations (such as team turnover, independent contractors, or defunct web agencies), a DatoCMS project may still be actively used by collaborators inside a project, but its account owner on file with us has not logged in for more than a year (see above for detailed timeline).

If a project is still in use, but the account owner is no longer active and cannot be reached, please contact DatoCMS Support for help. We may be able to manually process an account ownership change for you, but please be prepared to provide formal documentation, such as an official letter on company letterhead or some other proof of ownership change.