A card expires, a bank blocks a payment, someone changes accounts. It happens, and it shouldn't put a family's photographs at risk.
Nothing is deleted#
This is the part worth stating first, because it's the fear: your photos are not deleted when a payment fails. Not immediately, and not at the end of the grace period.
For 14 days nothing changes: everyone in the hub keeps adding photos while the payment is sorted out. After that the hub becomes read-only. Everything stays exactly where it is, visible to every member and downloadable.
What read-only means#
You can:
- See every album and every photo, as before
- Download individual photos, whole albums, or a full export
- Keep using everything else in Keepr that isn't the hub
You can't add new photos to the hub until the subscription is active again.
That split is deliberate. Blocking uploads applies pressure to fix the payment; blocking access would hold a family's memories hostage, which is the thing we think is wrong with how some products handle this.
What happens after the 14 days#
New photos can't be added to the hub until it's paid, and nothing else happens. The hub stays read-only, every member keeps seeing and downloading everything, and it stays that way indefinitely. There's no point at which an unpaid hub gets cleaned up or deleted.
That's a commitment rather than an accident: it's written into our Terms and Conditions, not just a policy we happen to follow this year.
Fixing it puts everything back#
Updating the payment method restores the hub immediately. Nothing needs re-uploading, nothing was moved, and no settings are lost — the read-only state simply lifts.
Get your photos out if you'd rather not continue#
If the answer is that the family doesn't want to keep paying, that's a legitimate outcome and read-only exists partly to make it survivable. Download what matters before you stop:
- Download your photos — individual photos or a whole album
- Export everything — a full copy, emailed as a link
Everyone in the hub can do this, not just the admin.
Who gets told#
The billing admin, by email: the day the payment fails, three days before uploads pause, and the day they pause, each time with one button to update the payment. Nobody else in the hub is emailed. A member who tries to add photos while the hub is paused is told the hub is paused, never whose payment it was.
If the billing admin isn't the person who would actually act on it, say a parent who set the hub up years ago and rarely opens the app, hand billing to another admin now rather than finding out during those 14 days. See Admins and members.