Free KV store lifecycle

Free KV stores are meant for development, not for running something indefinitely at $0. Each one expires 30 days after it is created, and PandaStack warns you five times before anything is deleted.

The clock runs from creation, not from last use

A store you’re writing to every second expires on the same day as one you’ve never touched.

The timeline

Day 0 is the day you create the store. Day 30 is its expiry date, shown on the store’s page in the dashboard.

Day	What happens	Your data
0	Store created, running	—
23	Email + in-app: expires in 7 days	Untouched
29	Email + in-app: expires tomorrow	Untouched
30	Suspended. The store stops accepting connections.	Kept
37	Email + in-app: data deleted in 7 days	Kept
43	Email + in-app: final warning — deleted tomorrow	Kept
44	Purged. Store and data permanently deleted.	Gone

So you have 30 days of a running store, then 14 more days in which your data is still recoverable.

What “suspended” means

At day 30 the underlying Redis is stopped, not deleted. Concretely:

• Connections fail. Anything using KV_URL will start erroring.
• The store still appears in your dashboard, marked suspended, with a countdown to purge.
• Every key you had written is still on disk.

What “purged” means

At day 44 the store and its volume are deleted. This is not recoverable — there is no backup of a free-tier KV store to restore from. If your data matters, either upgrade before day 44 or export it before day 30.

Keeping your store

Upgrade it. Moving the store to kv-starter or kv-pro cancels the clock entirely — the lifecycle only ever looks at free-tier stores, so a paid store simply stops being a candidate. If the store was already suspended, upgrading restarts it with your data intact.

There is no way to extend a free store’s 30 days without upgrading. Deleting and recreating gives you a fresh 30 days, but it is a new store with a new name suffix, a new password, and no data.

Where to see the deadline

The store’s page in the dashboard shows a banner with the days remaining, which gets more prominent as the date approaches and turns into a suspended-state notice after day 30. The API returns the same information:

curl https://api.pandastack.io/v1/kv/my-cache-4e8aad \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PANDASTACK_TOKEN"

{
  "name": "my-cache-4e8aad",
  "tier": "kv-free",
  "status": "running",
  "expiresAt": "2026-08-24T10:12:00.000Z",
  "lifecycleStage": "active"
}

lifecycleStage moves through active → warned_7 → warned_1 → suspended → purge_warned_7 → purge_warned_1 → purged.

Paid stores

Paid KV stores have no expiry and no lifecycle clock. They run until you delete them, and are billed at a flat monthly price per store.