On the Free plan, the replayable evidence record for each submission is kept for 12 months from hand-in. That covers the rest of any school year plus its appeal season, in either hemisphere, the window in which classroom disputes actually happen. This page is the whole policy, stated plainly.
What expires, and what stays
Twelve months after a submission was handed in, its detailed edit history (the part that powers replay) is deleted. The submission itself stays: the final document, its SHA-256 fingerprint, the verification outcome, your grades and feedback, and the server checkpoints. So even after expiry, the record still attests that a verified chain with that exact fingerprint was anchored to server time on those dates. You keep the outcome; the keystroke-level record is what expires. Anything expired says so honestly in the product rather than failing mysteriously.
You will never be surprised by this
- A visible date, all year. Submission lists show when evidence is due to expire. It’s never hidden in a policy document alone.
- Warnings at 60, 30 and 7 days. In the product and by email, batched by month (“evidence from March expires soon”), each with a one-click export.
- Export is always free. Before, during and on the expiry date: download a submission’s bundle or your whole workspace. Exported bundles verify independently of us, indefinitely. This is always the first thing to do, and it costs nothing.
- A dispute hold, free. If a submission is involved in an integrity case, an appeal or any formal process, flag it and its evidence is held for as long as the dispute runs, no charge, no time limit, audit-logged. Nobody should ever lose exculpatory evidence to a calendar.
Why 12 months?
Evidence records are heavy (every keystroke of every essay) and keeping them costs real storage. On a $0 plan we keep them for the entire period they’re useful in a classroom dispute, then let them expire on notice. We’d rather run a free plan with an honest 12-month window than one propped up by hoping you don’t use it. The full school year is always covered. That’s not changing.
Schools keep records longer
Institutions answer to records policies measured in years, not months: appeals, reviews, the complaint that resurfaces two years later. That’s an institutional need, so it lives on the School plan: retention set to the school’s own records policy, seven years by default. If your school takes over your workspace, its retention policy applies to your existing evidence too. Nothing about the 12-month clock is irreversible before the date arrives.