NodemancyDocsMapLibraryCards
Troubleshooting

My palace stopped saving

Nothing has been deleted. Every node, lens, route and card is still there, still yours, and still exportable in one file. What has paused is writing.

What still works

  • Reading every node, lens and route
  • Search and the canvas
  • Reviewing flashcards you already made
  • Exporting the whole palace, any time
  • Turning hosted AI off

That list is not a courtesy selection. Reviewing the cards you already made is using what you built rather than making more of it, and turning hosted AI off has to stay available because a privacy control is never a billing lever — you can always switch it off, whatever state the account is in.

Export is the one that matters, so it is worth being plain about. A full archive of everything you have written is available at any time while frozen, on the same terms as always. A tool that held your work hostage to a subscription would have failed the thing this whole app claims about ownership. Getting your data out.

What is paused

Adding, editing and deleting — nodes, lenses, entries, links, routes, groups, attachments, and generating new cards. The controls are still on screen and will tell you the palace is read-only rather than failing quietly.

One boundary worth knowing precisely: changing who can see a lens is paused, so a private lens cannot be made public while frozen. Adding a person to a lens you were already sharing still works.

Why it happened

A hosted subscription ended — lapsed, cancelled, or a trial that ran out without converting. Rather than deleting anything or locking you out, the account moves to a state where it can be read and not written.

Read-only is not the free plan. On this project free means self-hosting — running the app against your own database, where nothing is billed because nothing is hosted for you. A hosted account whose subscription ended has not become a self-hoster, and telling it that it had would be describing a different product. The two are separate states with separate consequences.

Nothing freezes anyone during early access

Billing is off while this is in early access, so no account is in this state today. The mechanism is live and idle, which is deliberate: a data-durability promise is worth nothing if it is built the week it is first needed.

Getting writing back

Open the account panel and resume the subscription. Writing returns immediately; nothing needs restoring, because nothing was removed.

The other route out is the one this app is built to leave open. Take a full export and run the app yourself against your own database, which is what free means here — the source is published and the vault is markdown files you already own. Working with files.

Why the app cannot simply be persuaded

Worth one paragraph, because it is the same reasoning as everything else here about your data. The freeze is enforced by the database, not by the interface hiding buttons. Every write in this app goes from your browser straight to the database, so a check written in the app would be one console command from being bypassed — and a rule that can be talked out of is not a rule.

The same property is what makes the list above trustworthy in the other direction. Reading and exporting are not left on by an oversight that could be tightened later; they were never inside the boundary.

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