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Deleted my free Starter team and lost the whole account. How do I get my running yearly Pro subscription onto my new account?

  • August 27, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 39 views
Aurora Studio new

(case: 2094795)

Hi everyone,

I am hoping someone can tell me whether this is fixable and what the
usual path is.

My account had two teams with almost identical names: "AURORA STUDIO"
in capitals, which was my paid Professional team on a yearly plan, and
"Aurora Studio" in lowercase, which was a leftover free Starter team.
Having two nearly identical teams next to each other was annoying, so
yesterday I set out to delete the free Starter one.

After that, both teams were gone and I could not log in with my email
address any more. Assuming my login was broken, I signed up again with
that same address. The signup went straight through and gave me a new,
empty account on the free plan. From what I have read here, that is only
possible if the original account no longer exists, so it looks like I
deleted the entire account rather than just the free team.

My yearly Professional subscription was never cancelled and is still
running. So I now have a paid plan that is not attached to any team any
more, and a new free account on the same email address that Figma is
asking me to pay for again.

I do not want to cancel anything. I want to keep the plan I am already
paying for and use it on my new account.

My questions:

1. Is there any way to get a running subscription reconnected to a new
   account after the original account was deleted, or is this always a
   support case?
2. Has anyone been through this? Did support move the subscription, or
   did they refund the unused part and let you buy a new plan?
3. Is there any chance of recovering files from a deleted account, or is
   that definitively gone?
4. One more thing I never understood, and it is what got me into this
   mess in the first place: when I upgraded from Starter to Professional,
   I ended up with two teams in my account, a free one and a paid one,
   instead of my existing team simply being upgraded. Is that expected
   behaviour, or did I do something wrong during the upgrade? I would
   much rather have a single Pro team than a free team sitting next to a
   paid one. If this is how the upgrade works by design, I would like to
   understand the reasoning, because it is exactly what made me try to
   delete the free team.

Happy to share my email address and invoice details privately with a
moderator or through the support form.

Thanks a lot.

Best answer by Gayani_S

Hey ​@Aurora Studio new, thanks for reaching out! 

Since this involves your specific account and billing history, I can't look into the account itself here on the forum for security reasons. But I can see that you’ve already contacted out customer support team (Ticket 2094795).

A couple of things worth knowing:

  • Deleting a team and deleting an account are two separate actions. One isn't supposed to trigger the other. So what you're describing doesn't match standard behaviour, which means we need to check your the account directly.
  • Subscriptions aren't automatically cancelled when an account is deleted. So it's expected that a running Professional plan subscription would keep going in the background regardless of what happened to the team or account tied to it. More in Delete your Figma account.
  • Account deletion itself is permanent and not reversible. This is official policy, not something we can undo. 
  • One thing worth checking right now: when a team gets deleted, Figma sends a confirmation email with a "Restore team" link, valid for 28 days. That goes to your inbox, not through your Figma login, so it's worth a look regardless of your account's status. More here: Restore a deleted team.
  • On your upgrade question: upgrading works by clicking the Free badge next to a specific team's name in your sidebar and choosing the Professional plan for that team. It upgrades that one team in place and doesn't create a second one. If you ended up with two teams, a new one was most likely created separately at some point rather than your original Starter team being upgraded. Details here: Upgrade or downgrade your plan.

Reconnecting the subscription, and what's actually recoverable for the team, needs someone to look at the account and logs directly, which isn't something I can do from here.

Someone from our team will be in touch with you soon, appreciate your patience! 

3 replies

Gayani_S
Figmate
  • Gayani_S
  • Community Support
  • Answer
  • August 27, 2026

Hey ​@Aurora Studio new, thanks for reaching out! 

Since this involves your specific account and billing history, I can't look into the account itself here on the forum for security reasons. But I can see that you’ve already contacted out customer support team (Ticket 2094795).

A couple of things worth knowing:

  • Deleting a team and deleting an account are two separate actions. One isn't supposed to trigger the other. So what you're describing doesn't match standard behaviour, which means we need to check your the account directly.
  • Subscriptions aren't automatically cancelled when an account is deleted. So it's expected that a running Professional plan subscription would keep going in the background regardless of what happened to the team or account tied to it. More in Delete your Figma account.
  • Account deletion itself is permanent and not reversible. This is official policy, not something we can undo. 
  • One thing worth checking right now: when a team gets deleted, Figma sends a confirmation email with a "Restore team" link, valid for 28 days. That goes to your inbox, not through your Figma login, so it's worth a look regardless of your account's status. More here: Restore a deleted team.
  • On your upgrade question: upgrading works by clicking the Free badge next to a specific team's name in your sidebar and choosing the Professional plan for that team. It upgrades that one team in place and doesn't create a second one. If you ended up with two teams, a new one was most likely created separately at some point rather than your original Starter team being upgraded. Details here: Upgrade or downgrade your plan.

Reconnecting the subscription, and what's actually recoverable for the team, needs someone to look at the account and logs directly, which isn't something I can do from here.

Someone from our team will be in touch with you soon, appreciate your patience! 

Aurora Studio new

Hi Gayani, thanks a lot for the quick reply and for the links.

You are right, and I have realised the same in the meantime: what I
deleted was the account, not just the team. That was my mistake.

On the "Restore team" email: there is none. I checked my inbox and spam
folder, and the only email I received from Figma is this one:

  "Your account has finished deleting. You recently deleted your
  hello@…. Figma account. It's done processing and is now
  deleted. As a reminder, you no longer have access to files you created
  with this account."

So this really was an account deletion and no team restore link exists.
I have accepted that the files are gone.

One thing I would like to point out, not as a complaint but because it
seems relevant: this deletion went through while my yearly Professional
subscription was active. My understanding from the help centre is that a
paid subscription has to be cancelled before an account can be deleted.
In my case it clearly was not, which is how I ended up with a running
plan that has no account attached to it.

Where I stand now: I signed up again with the SAME email address, and to
be able to keep working I took a monthly Professional subscription on
the new account and cancelled it right away, so it runs for one month
and will not renew. That means I am currently paying twice, because the
old yearly plan is still running in the background.

What I would like to ask for is NOT a refund. Could the unused remainder
of my old yearly subscription be added to my new account on top of the
month I have just paid for? So that the purchased month runs first and
the remaining time from the yearly plan is appended after it, rather
than running in parallel. That way nothing is lost on either side and I
simply stay on Professional for the time I have already paid for.

If transferring the subscription itself is not technically possible,
applying the unused value as billing credit to this account would work
just as well for me.

For reference, this is ticket 2094795.

Thanks again!

Gayani_S
Figmate
  • Gayani_S
  • Community Support
  • August 28, 2026

Hey ​@Aurora Studio new, thanks for confirming all that! 

You're right on both counts. What you deleted was the account, not just the team, and there's no restore option for that since account deletion is permanent. 

You're also right about the subscription policy: cancelling a paid Professional plan is supposed to be a required step before an account can be deleted, so what happened on your account doesn't match that expected flow. That's exactly the kind of thing that needs someone with access to your account's deletion logs to dig into, which I can't do from here.

On applying the unused time from your old yearly plan to your new account (or as billing credit), that's an account-specific billing decision, so I can't confirm what's possible.

Since you've already laid out your proposal really clearly here (let the current month run first, then apply the remaining time), make sure that same detail is on ticket 2094795 so our team sees your full ask. 

Appreciate your patience with this one, you'll hear from us on that ticket soon.

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