Downgrade or close your account

There are two different things people mean by closing an account, and they are handled differently.

If you want to stop paying a monthly fee

Downgrade to the Free plan yourself. You keep your account, your data, your campaigns and your forms, and you pay nothing per month.

1. Go to Settings, then Billing.
2. On the Current Plan card, select Show Plans.
3. On the Free card, select Switch to Free and confirm.

Donately asks you to confirm with Switch to the Free plan? and explains that your platform fee may change and your account moves to pay-as-you-go pricing. If you are part way through a paid billing cycle, the change takes effect at the end of it, and you keep your current plan's pricing until then.

You have to do this yourself. Emailing support to say you want to downgrade does not stop future subscription payments. The change has to be made on the Billing page.

If your organisation is on a custom or enterprise plan, the self-serve chooser is not shown and the page tells you to contact your Donately account manager instead.

What downgrading does not do

Moving to the Free plan changes what Donately charges you. It does not stop donations. Your forms and pages stay live, your donors' recurring plans keep running, and gifts keep arriving. That is usually what people want, but it is worth being explicit about.

To stop a specific donor's recurring gift, cancel that plan from Recurring Plans. There is no bulk cancel, so a wind-down means cancelling plans individually. See Recurring plan statuses.

If you want the account closed for good

There is no self-serve way to close, delete or deactivate a Donately account. Closing one is a manual process, because it means dealing with in-flight recurring gifts, live public pages, and your donation records.

Ask us to do it:

1. Open Support & feedback from the sidebar, or go to the Support page and select Contact support.
2. Choose the Billing issue category.
3. Say that you want the account closed, and name the account.

We will come back to you with a few questions, mostly about what should happen to active recurring donations and whether you need your data exported first.

Downgrade to Free first if you are on a paid plan. Closure requests are handled by a person and are not instant, so downgrading yourself is what guarantees no further subscription payment runs in the meantime.

Before you ask for closure

Take your data with you. From Donations, Contacts and Recurring Plans you can each use Export to email yourself a full CSV. See How to export data.

If you are a donor, not an organisation

If you give to an organisation through Donately and want to stop a recurring donation, you can cancel it yourself from your donor dashboard. See Change or cancel your recurring donation. You can also contact the organisation you support directly.