Downgrading and letting a plan lapse
There is no "cancel subscription" button on Onflow Ads, because there is no subscription to cancel. A membership is a prepaid term that simply ends. Moving down the ladder therefore works differently from moving up: you wait for the current term to finish, then buy the tier you want.
The rule: no mid-term downgrades
While a higher tier is active, every lower paid tier is locked. On the pricing page the lower tier's button keeps its ordinary Get Lite / Get Plus wording but stops responding, and a small grey note appears underneath: "Available after your current plan expires — no mid-term downgrades."
If a purchase request reaches the server anyway, it is refused there too. The page shows a panel titled Can't downgrade mid-term carrying the server's own sentence: "You already have Plus active. Lower tiers can be purchased after it expires."
Nothing is charged in either case. The rule exists for one reason: you can never accidentally pay money to lose benefits you have already bought.
Because the block exists, there is also no partial refund for switching down mid-term. You keep everything you paid for until the day it ends.
How to move to a lower tier
- Do not renew. Nothing auto-renews, so this step is literally doing nothing. Your term runs to its end date.
- Let the term expire. On the expiry date your account reads as Free again, everywhere, at once.
- Buy the lower tier. Every paid card returns to an enabled Get [tier], and the purchase is an ordinary one — no forfeit warning, no checkbox. See Buying a plan.
There is no way to schedule a lower tier to begin when the current one ends, so if you want no gap at all you have to buy at the moment of expiry.
What changes the moment a membership expires
Your account falls back to Free behaviour everywhere, on the website and in the Telegram bot, judged on the date rather than on any job that has to run.
| Area | What changes |
|---|---|
| Subscriber Exchange | Caps return to Free values — 5 enrolled channels, 2 active ads, 7 base placements per cycle with no credit-bought extras. Matching priority returns to 0, matching focus widens to the whole pool, grace deletes stop, and the paid targeting dimensions lock (country, scheduled starts, day-parting, size band, the competitor blocklist, lookalike hosts). Topic and language targeting are unaffected — they are open at every tier. Review returns to the free queue |
| Boost | The standing discount goes to 0%, the per-order ceiling returns to $25, live orders return to 5 and Auto-Boost to 1. Dripfeed, scheduling, auto-refill, mass orders, CSV exports, the premium-only catalogue, bundle-discount eligibility, priority delivery, API keys, included delivery guarantees, webhooks and the Wholesale Desk all lock. The status-refresh cooldown returns to 60 seconds |
| Paid Promotions | Listings return to 5 and placements to 30 a month. Payout speed returns to "after the full run", monitoring to the 60-minute cadence, the re-verify cooldown to 15 days. Auto-verify, video creatives, the AI Channel Picker, bundles, recurring rebook, auctions, Proof Certificates, delivery insurance, Retention Escrow, the Performance Passport and any published dispute target all lock |
| Cross-Promotion | The monthly allowance returns to 5 initiations. Add-on discounts, the boost-credit reward per clean completion, included insurance and Blitz all stop |
| AI | Text returns to 1 action per UTC day and 3 per calendar month, and image generation locks. The AI button itself stays in every composer — Free reaches it like any other rung |
| Post composer | Inline buttons lock entirely, private Telegram links stop being accepted, and button colours lock. See the warning below about the External Links add-on |
| The attribution line | If you were on Plus or above, ads delivered into your channels carried no attribution line. From expiry they carry "advertisement via onflowads.com" again. This is about ads your channels host, not the ads you place — those always follow the host channel's plan, so your own lapse does not change them |
| Wallet | The deposit fee on top-ups returns to 9% and the withdrawal fee to 15%, with 1 withdrawal request per calendar month |
| Analytics and support | CSV export, the branded PDF report and raw per-sample data lock; the campaign rollup itself stays, as it is open to every tier. Email support is unchanged — the desk answers everyone in order of recency — but the Onflow AI support chat returns to the Free allowance of 30 messages per rolling 30-day cycle. The premium interface in the Telegram bot turns off |
The $1 External Links add-on is recorded against the tier you bought it on. When a membership lapses, your effective tier becomes Free — and the add-on you bought on Plus does not apply to Free. Non-Telegram links stop being accepted in new posts until you buy the add-on again for the tier you are now on. Nothing is refunded, and the earlier purchase reactivates automatically if you return to that same tier later. See Post buttons and links.
An over-cap button blocks a save and says so. A colour does not: below Plus the swatch row is not drawn and any colour on a creative you re-save is discarded, with no message. The buttons themselves survive — only the colours go. A creative you never re-save is not touched.
What is not affected
Expiry never deletes anything:
- Your account, sign-in and history stay exactly as they are.
- Your wallet balance is untouched — every cent stays yours and stays spendable in-platform.
- Your channels, listings, campaigns, orders, templates and saved data all remain.
- Saved ad templates past the new allowance lock rather than vanish. Your templates are ranked oldest-first and the first N — Free keeps 2 — stay fully usable; the rest are kept exactly as they are, shown with a 🔒 and an upgrade path, and cannot be edited, loaded into a booking or deleted until a plan covers them again. Upgrade later and they unlock in the order you made them.
- Anything already in flight — a Boost order in delivery, an escrowed booking, a running cross-promotion — is unaffected and keeps the terms it was created under. The one exception is the attribution line on a marketplace placement in one of your channels: that is decided from your live plan at the moment the ad is published, so a booking taken while you were on Plus but published after expiry goes out carrying the line.
- Your Telegram link, notifications and reliability record stay in place.
What changes is what you can do next. Where you are over a Free limit — more listings, more enrolled channels, more active exchange ads than Free allows — each product applies its own over-limit rules. In general you keep what exists and cannot create more until you are back under the cap or back on a paid tier.
What you will see afterwards
| Where | What it says |
|---|---|
| The status pill on the pricing page | "You're on Free · Wallet $42.10 · Top up" — no status word, no renewal date |
| The Free card | Current plan, disabled |
| Every paid card | Get Lite / Get Plus / … enabled again, with no note underneath |
| The Ultimate card | Apply, as always |
The pill carries no explanatory sentence about being on Free, and no days count. It is one line.
Rules and limits
- A lower tier cannot be purchased while a higher one is active, on any surface.
- There is no scheduled downgrade and no queued plan change.
- There is no cancellation, because nothing recurs.
- Expiry is judged on the date. A membership whose expiry has passed reads as Free everywhere, immediately, with nothing to invalidate or refresh.
- Coming back is instant. Buying again at any later date reactivates that tier's benefits right away.
If something goes wrong
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A lower tier's button does nothing | It is disabled while your higher tier is active; the note underneath says why | Wait for expiry, then buy it |
| A panel titled Can't downgrade mid-term | The server refused a downgrade request. Nothing was charged | Buy the lower tier after your current membership ends |
| Your tier still shows as paid after the expiry date | The pill reads live from your account, so this normally means the date has not actually passed yet | Check the exact date in the pill; a term ends at the time of day it was bought, not at midnight |
| You hold a lifetime membership and lower tiers stay locked | A lifetime membership has no expiry, so it never lapses | Only an upgrade changes it, and that ends it permanently. See Upgrading your tier |
| Non-Telegram links stopped working after expiry | The External Links add-on is scoped to the tier it was bought on | Buy it again for your current tier, or return to the tier you bought it on |
| A legacy $11 Premium membership lapsed and the price went up | Lapsing for 30 days or more releases the legacy lock permanently | Renewing within 30 days keeps it. See How billing works |
Frequently asked
How do I cancel my plan?
There is nothing to cancel — do not renew, and the membership ends by itself on its expiry date.
Will I be charged automatically at the end of my term?
No. Nothing auto-renews and no payment method is stored.
Can I get a refund for the rest of my term if I stop using it?
No. Terms are prepaid and are never refunded or prorated.
Can I switch to a cheaper tier right now?
Not while your current membership is active. Wait for expiry, then buy the cheaper tier.
Do I lose my data if I go back to Free?
No. Nothing is deleted. Only your limits, fees and available features change.
Will I be reminded before expiry?
No. Neither the website nor the Telegram bot sends an expiry reminder; the plan simply ends on its date. The date is on the pricing page's status pill ("Active until [date]"), and renewing early never costs a day.
Related
- How billing works — the rules underneath all three flows, in one place.
- Renewing your membership — how to avoid the lapse in the first place.
- Post buttons and links — why the External Links add-on is tier-scoped.
- Where tier limits appear — where a Free limit will show up next.