Who Can Do What After Expiry
Expiry affects everyone in the same way operationally, but the three roles have very different recovery options. This page covers each in turn.
Organization administrator
An administrator keeps full identity and full access to the recovery path.
Still available
- Signing in — both an existing browser session and a fresh sign-in
- The dashboard and all read-only pages
- All historical data: surveys, responses, files, field tasks
- The subscription page, showing current status and period dates
- Billing pages, invoices, and orders
- The renewal flow
Blocked
- Creating or editing surveys, questions, sections, groups, and choices
- Publishing or republishing
- Collecting new responses through any channel
- Moving responses through review
- Approving or settling your own renewal order — this requires the platform team
How to describe it internally
The correct framing is "our paid service period has ended", not "our account has been disabled". Nothing about your identity, your team, or your data has been taken away. Only the ability to perform new operational work is paused, and renewal restores it.
Team members (non-administrators)
Ordinary members of your organization are affected differently, because billing is a permission that most of them do not hold.
Still available
- Signing in — existing session or fresh sign-in
- Read-only pages they already had access to, such as the survey list
- Viewing existing responses within their permissions
Blocked
- Opening a survey in the web survey player
- Submitting a response — nothing is saved
- All authoring and publishing actions
- Review workflow transitions
Important
Billing and renewal are not automatically available to every member. A member without billing permission is refused those pages as a permission matter, independently of subscription state — the same refusal they would get while the subscription is perfectly healthy.
So if a team member reports that they cannot renew, that is usually correct and expected. Renewal should be performed by an administrator or by a member who has been granted billing permission explicitly.
Platform team
Platform operators retain full administrative authority over an organization whose subscription has lapsed. That is the whole point — they are the ones who process recovery.
Available
- Finding and viewing the organization; expiry never hides it
- Inspecting subscription status and period dates
- Inspecting orders, invoices, and payments
- Approving a renewal order, recording payment, verifying payment proof, and applying the order
- Entering a selected-organization context to assist
The boundary that matters
Administrative authority is not an operational bypass.
When a platform operator acts on behalf of an organization, the request carries that organization's identity, and the subscription check applies exactly as it would for that organization's own users.
Platform privilege decides which organization you may act for. It does not decide whether that organization's subscription is in force. A platform operator cannot create a survey or collect a response for an expired organization; they can only process the commercial steps that end the expiry.
Operators without the required platform permission are refused before any subscription decision is reached, and that refusal reveals nothing about the organization's billing state.
Summary
| Sign in | Read data | Billing and renewal | Operational work | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organization administrator | Yes | Yes | Yes | Blocked |
| Team member | Yes | Yes | Only with billing permission | Blocked |
| Platform operator | Yes | Yes | Yes, and can approve and apply | Blocked for that organization |