Will I lose my photos if I stop paying?

PixVenu galleries are sold as one-time purchases, not subscriptions. You pay once for an event and the gallery is yours for the hosting window that came with your package — there's no recurring bill, no auto-renew, and no card on file that we keep charging for the same gallery.

This article exists because the question shows up often when people are comparing photo-sharing tools. Many of our competitors use a subscription model where missing a renewal payment locks you out of your photos. PixVenu doesn't work that way.

Your hosting window. Each package comes with a hosting window measured from your event's end date. How long it runs depends on the tier: Essential galleries get 3 months, while Signature and Premier get 12 months. (Free galleries have no time limit at all — they're governed by the 30-photo cap, not the calendar.) During that window, the gallery is fully accessible: guests can keep uploading until the upload cutoff you set, you can download ZIPs, the dashboard shows the responses and engagement data, the slideshow projector runs, everything. We don't take any of that away during the window because we already got paid for it.

What happens after the window ends (design contract). When the hosting window closes, the gallery moves to a read-only state and eventually becomes inaccessible to guests and to you. The plan is that the window-end date is visible on your gallery's dashboard from the day you purchase, and reminder emails land as it approaches so it's never a surprise. (Heads up: the in-app countdown + reminder emails ship alongside Stripe billing integration; the underlying gates that read live_at + the upload window are wired and tested today — only the billing surface is pending.)

The important thing to do before the window ends is download your content. From the gallery dashboard, the Download all ZIP action exports every photo and video in original resolution along with a CSV of contributors, a copy of the guestbook messages, and (if you used Digital Invitations) a CSV of RSVPs. That ZIP is yours forever — copy it to a hard drive, upload it to your own cloud storage, or burn it to a disc if you're feeling retro. Once you've got the ZIP, the gallery becoming inaccessible later doesn't take your photos with it.

Extending the hosting window (design contract). If you'd like the gallery to stay live past the original window — to keep collecting late uploads, to keep family viewing access open, or just to delay the download-everything task — the model is that you can purchase additional hosting time from the host dashboard. The longer you extend the more you get for the same money, much like buying a longer-term phone plan. Extensions stack additively against the original purchase date. The in-app Extend flow ships alongside the billing surface above; until then, the contact team handles extensions manually — see extend-your-gallery-window for the current handoff path.

Soft-deleted photos. If you deleted a photo during the event (yours, a guest's, anything), it sits in the gallery's Trash for a while before being permanently removed. You can restore from Trash for as long as the row hasn't been emptied. Read the deleting photos and videos article for the full recovery flow.

To recap the trust model. You bought the gallery for an event — we promised you a window, and we honor that window. There's no card on file that would lapse and lock you out. There's no missed-renewal trap. The only path from "your gallery works" to "your gallery doesn't work" is the calendar reaching the end of the window you bought, and that's flagged clearly in your dashboard with plenty of notice. Download the ZIP at any point and the content is yours regardless of what happens to the live gallery.

For business and partner accounts, the gallery-bundle model works similarly — you've purchased a quota of galleries that activate one-by-one, and each activated gallery gets its own hosting window. Cancelling a partner account just stops new activations; the galleries you already activated keep running through their windows.

If you have a specific concern about your account, get in touch from the contact page and we'll walk through what your situation looks like.