What happens to your files if hosting ends

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

If your hosting ends, your gift doesn't vanish overnight.

Not the photo. Not the song. Not the short video. For months after the last payment, all of it stays in our storage — paused, not gone — and resuming the hosting brings it back.

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 deleted them the day a card expired, "rebuilt from memory" would not be the same thing.

So we made it an operational rule: the subscription controls access first. You pay, the QR opens the page. You stop paying, and after a grace period the page is archived — hidden, but kept. Only much later are the files deleted.

What actually happens, step by step

When a monthly payment fails: - Your gift page stays fully live. We email you once so you can update your card, and the payment is retried automatically over the next few days.

When the subscription ends (you cancel, or the retries fail): - The gift page stays fully live for 14 more days. Anyone who has the stone can resume the hosting during that time.

After those 14 days: - The page is archived. Scanning the QR shows that the gift is archived, with a way to resume it. Your files stay in our storage.

Six months after that: - The files are permanently deleted. We can't bring a gift back after this point.

If you resume before the files are deleted: - Everything reappears exactly as it was. - There is no re-activation fee. The price is the same $4 a month.

What if Tablestones goes away?

Your gift page is online for as long as its hosting is active and Tablestones operates the service. Nobody plans to shut down — but that is the honest limit, and I would rather name it than hide it.

The code on your stone is never reused

One other detail worth naming: the code engraved on your stone — the unique code after the short URL — is written once into our database. It is never rewritten and never handed to another gift. There is no delete button for it in our system, by design: a stone that turns up in a closet years from now should still point to its own gift.

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.