We don't delete your files

There's a sentence I want you to read twice:

If your Tablestones subscription ends, we do not delete your files.

Not the photo. Not the song. Not the short video. Not the chat thread between you and the person who scanned the stone.

All of it stays exactly where it is. It is just not reachable from outside until you resubscribe.

Why this is the rule

When you make a Tablestones gift, you put real, specific meaning into it. A photo of a Sunday morning. Words you wrote at 1 a.m. for your brother. The version of "Happy Birthday" we generated in a bluegrass key because your dad loves mandolin.

Those files are not interchangeable. If we delete them and you resubscribe a year from now, "rebuilt from memory" is not the same thing.

So we made it an operational rule: the subscription controls access, not existence. You pay, the QR opens the page. You stop paying, the QR shows "This gift is paused." The files never move.

If you resubscribe next month, next year, or six years from now — assuming Tablestones still exists — the page comes back exactly as it was.

What actually happens, step by step

The day your card fails the final retry or you cancel in your account: - Your gift page stays fully live. Nothing changes yet. - We send you an email: "subscription ended, grace period started."

Seven days later: - We send a second email: "access pauses in 7 days. One click to keep it online."

Fourteen days after the initial cancellation: - We flip a flag. The QR, when scanned, now shows "This gift is paused." That's it. - The files are still in our storage. The short URL still resolves. The database row for the gift page still exists. Only the visible page has changed.

If you come back later and resubscribe: - The flag flips. Everything reappears. - We don't charge a re-activation fee. There isn't one. The pricing is the same as if you'd never stopped.

What if Tablestones goes away?

The only thing that could actually delete your files is Tablestones discontinuing the service entirely. That's the one scenario we're explicit about in our subscription terms: "access continues as long as Tablestones operates the service."

If that day ever comes, we commit in writing to: 1. Give at least 180 days advance notice to every subscriber 2. Provide a free bulk-download tool so you can pull every photo, song, and video you created 3. Keep the short-URL domain resolving to a page that explains what happened for at least 10 years after shutdown

Nobody plans to shut down. But I spent enough time thinking about what makes a gift actually last — not just until next year, but decades — that I wanted to name the worst case and be clear about it.

Short URLs are forever

One other detail worth naming: the slug engraved on your stone — the unique code after the short URL — is written once into our database and never removed. Never rewritten. Never reused. Even if the gift page it points to is paused, the slug itself is permanent.

That is the most durable software design decision we made, because the physical stone you mailed to someone carries a promise that the QR on it will still resolve. If our database ever forgot what a slug points to, a stone that showed up in a closet years from now would be broken.

So, for the record: the short-URL table is WORM — write-once, read-many. No delete button. No rewrite. This is unusual — most databases are happy to forget. Ours can't.

None of this is a promise you paid for

Everything I just described is how we chose to build it, not what your $4/month buys you. What you pay for is access — the running service that connects your stone to your gift page.

What you get for free is our obsession with keeping the meaning you put into the stone.