Afisena
The question rarely gets asked out loud in a sales conversation, and it is the one a procurement officer is actually weighing: if this does not work out, what happens to our data?
A vendor who cannot answer it precisely is telling you something. So here is the precise answer, including the parts that are inconvenient.
Deletion is a thirty-day process, not a button
Asking to delete a school does three things immediately and destroys nothing.
Immediately: the school stops resolving. Its address goes dark for staff, students and anyone holding a link. Billing stops renewing, and any pending charge is closed out rather than left to fire later.
Nothing is destroyed at this stage. Not content, not uploaded files, not the custom domain. That distinction is the whole design: everything destructive happens in the final step, so there is nothing for a cancellation to fail to restore.
Within the window: cancelling brings the school back to active, and everything reappears.
After the window: content and stored files are swept, the custom domain is released, and the record becomes a marker that the school existed and is gone.
Why the grace period matters more than it looks
Deletion requests are made by people, often on a bad day, sometimes by the wrong person.
A system that deletes on the click of the button treats an angry Friday afternoon as a final decision. A system that goes dark immediately but destroys nothing for thirty days treats it as reversible until somebody has had a weekend to think — while still doing the thing that was actually asked for, which is making the school stop being reachable.
The going-dark-immediately half matters too. A school that has decided to leave usually needs access to stop today, for reasons that have nothing to do with software.
Get the data out first, and do not rely on the window
The thirty days are insurance, not a plan. Before requesting deletion, export what you need while the school still resolves:
- Marks, per subject, as spreadsheet files. These carry a key to their own symbols inside the file, so they remain readable long after the screen that produced them is gone.
- Exam results, including who did not sit each paper — a mark sheet with silent gaps is how an absent student becomes a zero somewhere else.
- Your roster. Names, student numbers, class membership.
- Uploaded material you did not author elsewhere. Anything you wrote in another tool you presumably still have; anything created here you do not.
Do this while the school is live. Once it stops resolving, the pages you would export from are not reachable either.
What a custom domain does
If your school runs on its own domain rather than a subdomain, that domain is released back to you at the end of the process. It was never taken from you — pointing DNS at a platform is a thing you can undo unilaterally, on your side, at any point, without asking anybody.
That is worth understanding before signing rather than after: a school on its own domain can walk away and keep its address. A school on a provider's subdomain is walking away from the address as well, and every link anyone ever shared with it.
The question to ask any vendor, including this one
Not "can we export our data" — everyone says yes.
Ask: what exactly is deleted, when, and what can be undone after the button is pressed? The answer should have dates in it. If it does not, the honest reading is that nobody has decided yet, and you will find out what happens at the same time they do.