By Brett Kaufman. 8 years using relationships to build sales pipelines, from political fundraising to a 7 figure business to running matchmaking for two communities. Over 1,000 introductions facilitated.

What happens to your contacts if you cancel depends on the tool, which is why you need to know before you import them, not after. Check four things in any personal CRM first: the export format, what happens to your data after you cancel, how delete works, and how long backups keep a copy.

Here is the moment it matters. You are a week out from a conference. You find a tool that promises to tell you who to text. It asks for your phone contacts, your Gmail, your LinkedIn export. Eight years of relationships, every broker, banker, CPA and searcher you have ever met, all in one upload.

Then the quiet thought: what if I hate this in a month?

That thought is correct. Your contact list is the business. A tool that holds it hostage is a bigger risk than any tool that fails to help you. Here is how I would check.

Check 1: What can you export, and in what format

“You can export your data” means nothing until you know the format.

• vCard (.vcf). The format your phone reads. Open the file on an iPhone or import it into Google Contacts and the people are back. If you ever want to leave, this is the one that gets your network home.
• CSV. A spreadsheet. Good for moving into another CRM, or sorting by company on a plane.
• Full export (often JSON). Everything the tool learned: notes, dates you met, who introduced who, history. This is the part that is hard to rebuild. A names and numbers export loses the context, and context is why you bought the tool.

Ask one more thing. Is export a button you press yourself, any time, or an email to support that takes days? If you are in a hurry to leave, a support ticket is a lock.

If you are in the EU or deal with EU contacts, there is a legal floor here. Article 20 of the GDPR gives people the right to receive the data they provided “in a structured, commonly used and machine readable format.” Plenty of tools outside Europe meet that bar anyway. Some do not. Find out which kind yours is.

Check 2: What happens the day you cancel

Cancelling a subscription and deleting your data are two different events. Most people assume they are the same.

Look in the help pages for the cancellation policy and find out which of these is true:

1. You drop to a free plan and your data stays put.
2. You are locked out but the data is kept, sometimes so you will come back.
3. The data is deleted after a set number of days.
4. Nothing is written down.

The fourth is the one to worry about. If the policy is not written, you do not have one.

Whatever the answer, my rule is the same: export before you cancel, not after. Once billing stops, you are depending on the company to still let you in.

Check 3: How delete actually works

There are two questions here.

Who can press delete. Some tools let you delete your account in settings. Some need an email to support. Some make it easy for one kind of account and harder for another, for example an account created with a password versus one created with Google sign in. Find out which path applies to the way you signed up.

What delete removes. Your contacts, yes. But also the research the tool did on them, the drafts it wrote, the notes you dictated after a dinner. Ask whether delete takes all of it, or just the contact records.

Article 17 of the GDPR, the right to erasure, requires removal “without undue delay” in the cases it covers. It is a useful benchmark even if you are not in Europe.

Check 4: Backups

This is where most privacy pages go quiet.

Any serious tool backs up its data. That is good. It is why a server failure does not wipe your network. It also means a deleted account may still sit inside an older backup until that backup expires.

So the honest answer to “is it gone” is usually “gone from the live system now, gone from backups when they roll over.” A tool that tells you that is being straight with you. A tool that promises zero retention with no word on backups has not thought about it, or has not told you.

Ask: are backups encrypted, and how long are they kept?

What I would do before you import anything

One short routine before you put your network into any tool:

• Export your phone contacts to a vCard and keep the file somewhere safe. Now you have a copy no tool controls.
• Clean up duplicates before you import, not after. See how to deduplicate contacts without losing data.
• Import, use it for two weeks, then press the export button once. If what comes out is incomplete, you learned that cheaply.

More on getting the list ready: how to import and clean up your contact list.

How FRONT OF MIND handles it

FRONT OF MIND is the system I built to tell you who to text today and why, in about 10 minutes. Since it asks for your whole network, here is exactly what happens to it.

Export is for everyone, any time. In Settings, under Your data, every account can download contacts as CSV or vCard, or download one JSON file with everything in the account. Passwords and sign in keys are left out of that file, so it is safe to keep.

Cancelling does not delete anything. If you cancel the $29 a month plan, your account goes back to the free plan. Your contacts stay where they are until you export them or delete the account.

Delete. Any account can delete itself and all its data in Settings. If you signed up with a password, it asks for your password to confirm. If you signed up with Google, you type your email to confirm. It is removed from the app right away. Nightly encrypted backups made before that still hold a sealed copy, used only to recover from an outage.

While it is there. Your contacts are encrypted. No one on our team looks at them. Research on a person uses only their name, company, title and public profile links. Your notes and their phone numbers stay in your account.

If you want to compare tools on this exact point, the personal CRM comparison is a good place to start.

Start free with your first 25 contacts, press export once, and see who comes up first.

See how it works