Changing or Canceling Your Plan
All plan changes are made through the customer portal by the instance Administrator.
Upgrading
Upgrades to a higher tier take effect immediately through the customer portal, raising your Max Users and Max Instances limits (see Billing for the tier table). Your billing interval (monthly or yearly) stays the same, and all your seats carry over.
How the upgrade is charged depends on your billing interval:
| Billing interval | What you are charged |
|---|---|
| Monthly | The pro rata difference for the rest of the current month is added to your next monthly invoice. There is no separate charge at the time of the upgrade. |
| Yearly | The pro rata difference for the rest of the current year is invoiced and charged to your saved card immediately, because the next regular invoice would be the renewal, up to a year away. |
The same applies when you add seats. See Seats & Instance Limits for details.
Your Lakehousecat instance reads its plan from a signed license token, which the operator renews on a 6-hour cycle. After an upgrade, the instance therefore continues to show the previous plan for a short while. No action is required — the new plan is picked up automatically with the next renewal.
To apply it right away, restart the operator once. This triggers a fresh license handshake, and the instance reflects the new plan immediately:
kubectl rollout restart deployment lhc-operator -n lhc-operator
Downgrading
Downgrading requires your organization to already fit within the target tier's limits — see Downgrade Readiness. If your current seat count or active instance count exceeds the target tier, the downgrade is blocked until you:
- Remove users to bring your seat count within the target tier's Max Users (see User Management)
- Deactivate instances to bring your active instance count within the target tier's Max Instances (deactivated instances are Suspended, not deleted — see Instance Limits)
Once both are within the target tier's limits, the downgrade can proceed.
On a yearly plan, the lower price applies from the next renewal and there is no refund or credit for the remainder of the current term. On a monthly plan, the difference is settled on your next monthly invoice.
Canceling Your Subscription
Canceling does not freeze or delete your data. Instead, your organization falls back to the FREE tier:
- Your organization is reduced to 1 active seat and 1 active instance (the FREE tier limits) — you keep using Lakehousecat, just at FREE-tier scale.
- Any additional users beyond the FREE seat limit remain registered but cannot be re-invited until you upgrade again.
- Any additional instances beyond the FREE instance limit are moved to Suspended — their data and configuration are preserved, and they can be reactivated by upgrading again (see Instance Limits).
Resubscribing at any time restores your previous tier's limits and reactivates any Suspended instances without a redeploy.