Bonsai: Deactivate or Delete, and Why It Matters

Deactivate and delete are two of the most dangerous words in software, because they sound like degrees of the same action and are not. One is a pause. The other is the end.

Bonsai documents both clearly, which is more than many vendors manage, and the gap between them is worth understanding before you are in a settings screen deciding quickly.

Deactivating

"Deactivating your account will archive all your projects, proposals, contracts, invoices and other account data."

The subscription is stopped or downgraded and the account becomes inactive. Your work is archived rather than destroyed.

Reversible — with a caveat worth reading twice. Support can re-enable login to the same account, but Bonsai states that "some of your data may not be recoverable".

That is an unusually honest sentence and a slightly alarming one. It does not say which data, or under what circumstances. So deactivation reliably gives you the account back and does not guarantee it gives you everything that was in it.

Which means: export before deactivating, not after. The point at which you can be certain what you have is while you can still see it.

Deleting

"Once completed, all data is permanently removed and cannot be restored."

"Deletion is irreversible."

No 30-day window of the kind Basecamp offers. No 60-day backup period. No recycle bin. The documentation uses the strongest available language and means it.

Two details follow from that.

It is not self-serve. You have to contact Bonsai Support by email or through the chat widget. That friction is deliberate and correct — an irreversible action on years of business records should require a conversation rather than a confirmation dialog at eleven at night.

It may not be available to you. Bonsai notes that "Some accounts may not be eligible for full deletion due to legal or operational requirements". If you have processed payments through the platform, records may need to persist for reasons that have nothing to do with your preferences.

The option most people should take instead

Neither.

Bonsai's free Limited plan keeps every existing proposal, contract and invoice viewable, keeps projects and time tracking working, and — crucially — keeps export available.

Set against that, deactivation is strictly worse: an archived account you have to ask Support to reopen, with a warning attached about partial recovery.

Downgrade, do not deactivate, unless you have a specific reason to make the account inactive. The free plan is the better archive, and it costs the same.

When deletion is the right call

There are legitimate reasons, and they are worth separating from impulse.

Privacy. You want the data gone from a third party's systems, deliberately, and you have your own copy.

A closed business whose records now live with an accountant or in your own archive.

A test or duplicate account that should never have accumulated anything.

What is not a good reason is tidiness. An unused Bonsai account on the Limited plan costs nothing and holds your signed contracts. Deleting it to feel organised trades a free archive for a feeling.

Before either action

1. Export everything — invoices, proposals, contracts, expenses, client records, time entries.
2. Download forms and form responses specifically. These are blocked on the Limited plan, so they are the one category you cannot retrieve later.
3. Collect what you are owed. Whether clients can still pay existing invoices after a plan change is not resolved by the documentation, and elsewhere in this category - FreshBooks documents that they cannot.
4. Open the exported files and confirm they contain what you think.
5. Then decide, with the data already safe, which of the three options you actually want.

For how long other products keep your data after you walk away — and the range runs from "immediately" to "two years" — see how long software keeps your data after you stop paying.