SurveyMonkey Cancel Subscription: What Ends, What You Keep, and What It Costs
You can cancel a SurveyMonkey subscription by turning off auto-renew in your account settings. The paid plan then runs to the end of the current billing cycle, and the account drops to the free Basic plan. SurveyMonkey states it does not automatically refund remaining paid time when you cancel. The Basic plan itself stays free for as long as you want, with unlimited surveys and up to ten questions each.
Written by BuyPollVotes editorial desk | Last checked
What turning off auto-renew does
Cancelling a SurveyMonkey subscription is not a same-day shutdown. The company's pricing page states that turning off auto-renew downgrades the account to a free plan at the end of the current billing cycle. In practice that means the paid window you have already funded keeps running to its last day; nothing shuts off the moment you flip the switch, and nothing is deleted either. Your surveys, your collectors and the responses already gathered stay in the account throughout. There is no hidden second flow either: deleting an account is a distinct action with its own wording, and the refund sentence covers both cases.
Refunds are the sharper edge. SurveyMonkey's help centre says outright that the company does not automatically refund remaining paid time when a subscription is cancelled or an account is deleted. If three weeks remain in a monthly cycle when you cancel, those three weeks simply run out at paid level and then lapse. Money back is not the default; it is an exception you would have to raise with the company yourself, and the published pages promise nothing of the kind.
One written exception exists. SurveyMonkey's help pages give eligible consumers in one of its listed countries, the Netherlands among them, the right to cancel a new paid subscription within 14 calendar days. That right comes from consumer protection, not from goodwill, and it applies to new subscriptions specifically. A renewal halfway through a year of annual billing sits outside it.
The Basic plan, in plain terms
The plan you land on after cancelling is Basic, and it is genuinely permanent. SurveyMonkey describes Basic as the free tier for simple surveys, forms and quizzes, calls it always free, and states that you can use it for as long as you want. No credit card is required to keep it running, and there is no trial clock ticking underneath it.
The response cap is the detail that surprises people. SurveyMonkey's pricing page notes that Basic lets you view a limited number of responses per survey even if you collect more, and exceeding a plan's response limits in a billing cycle brings an extra charge per response. For a casual poll among friends the cap rarely bites; for anything with a wider audience it is the first wall you meet after the downgrade.
- Unlimited surveys, so the number of forms you build is never the constraint.
- Up to 10 questions on each survey, which shapes how long a poll can run.
- A limited number of viewable responses per survey, even when more responses arrive.
Does SurveyMonkey cost money?
Yes, above Basic. The vendor's published plan table lists paid personal tiers alongside Basic and Enterprise: a monthly one billed month to month, pitched at flexibility, and an annual one billed once a year at a lower effective monthly rate. SurveyMonkey keeps the exact figures on its pricing page, and this site's own rule is to describe rather than quote them.
Where the money actually goes: paid tiers raise the question cap, open up the full response view and add analysis tooling. The free route is not a crippled demo, though. It is a standing plan with a name, a spot on the same table and no expiry date. Cancelling a paid subscription therefore returns you to a working account, not to a blank screen.
One cost hides in the fine print: the per-response charge that applies once a plan's response limits are exceeded within a billing cycle. Heavy collectors feel that one first, and it is worth knowing before a big send-out on either side of a downgrade.
SurveyMonkey Enterprise, briefly
Enterprise is the tier above the self-serve plans, and SurveyMonkey designs it for the needs of large organizations. The company says its Enterprise plans are best suited to teams with five or more users, which places it well beyond a person running a poll for a club or a classroom quiz.
The feature list is administrative as much as analytical: single sign-on, HIPAA and GDPR compliance, regional hosting, user controls and permissions, governance and reporting, plus integrations with apps like Salesforce and Power BI. Because terms are arranged with the vendor, the auto-renew toggle described earlier is a self-serve mechanism; an Enterprise agreement is its own document, and cancellation follows whatever that contract sets out rather than the standard route.
Life after the downgrade
Once the cycle closes, the account sits on Basic and behaves like any other Basic account. Building continues without charge, ten questions per survey, limited response visibility. Responses gathered above the cap are not vaporised; SurveyMonkey's own wording is that you can collect more than you can view, which is a visibility problem rather than data loss.
Read as a whole, the plan table's point is the direction of travel: cancelling moves you from whichever row you occupy back into the Basic row on the day your billing cycle closes, and the doors between the rows stay open in both directions.
Resubscribing later restores the paid features; the pricing pages present the tiers as always available, so nothing is lost by stepping down and stepping back. What a downgrade does not rewind is time. Paid days already elapsed stay elapsed, whether you used them or not, and the calendar is the one thing no settings screen edits.
- Paid-only analysis tools stop working at the end of the billing cycle.
- Responses already collected remain in the account across the downgrade.
- The ten-question cap applies to every new survey you start on Basic.
- No automatic refund arrives for the paid days you do not use.
What cancelling cannot do
Cancelling changes what you pay, not what a poll has already recorded. The responses a survey gathered stay gathered, the counts stay counted, and the organiser reads the same data afterwards. Platform rules on manufactured entries are separate from billing: an organiser or a platform can flag and remove responses that look faked, whether they arrived during a paid month or a free one. Buying poll responses is therefore not something a subscription protects, and letting the plan lapse changes nothing about entries already under review.
Nor does cancelling settle a contest. Judging, tie-breaks and disqualification sit with whoever runs the contest, not with the survey tool that collected a few of its entries. And the published pages are silent on requested refunds beyond the Dutch 14-day right; if you want money back after the cycle has run, the documented default is that it will not arrive by itself.
| Plan | Billing rhythm | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | no charge, always | the standing entry tier for simple surveys, forms and quizzes |
| Standard Monthly | billed every month | flexibility for month-to-month users who want more headroom |
| Advantage Annual | billed once a year | a lower effective monthly rate in exchange for annual commitment |
| Enterprise | negotiated with the vendor | large organizations and teams of five or more users |
How to do it
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Open your account
Sign in on the SurveyMonkey site and open the account settings from the profile menu, where plan and billing details live.
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Find the billing section
The plan area shows your current subscription and its renewal status, which is the screen you need before anything else.
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Turn off auto-renew
Switching off auto-renew is the cancel action; SurveyMonkey confirms the account drops to a free plan when the billing cycle ends.
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Note the end date
Write down the cycle's last day, because paid features last until then and no refund is issued automatically for the remainder.
Common questions
How do you cancel a SurveyMonkey subscription?
You cancel by turning off auto-renew in your account settings, and SurveyMonkey then downgrades the account to a free plan at the end of the current billing cycle. Surveys and collected responses stay in place, paid features lapse at the cycle's close, and the company does not automatically refund the paid time left over. Deleting an account is a separate action with its own rule, and it falls under the same no-automatic-refund wording.
Can you cancel a SurveyMonkey subscription?
Yes, and the mechanics are simple: auto-renew off, paid features until the cycle ends, then the free Basic plan. The one documented exception is the 14-calendar-day cancellation right for eligible consumers in the Netherlands on new paid subscriptions. Beyond that window, no automatic refund applies to the unused portion of a cycle, so timing the cancellation against the billing date is the lever you actually control.
What is the SurveyMonkey Basic plan?
The Basic plan is SurveyMonkey's permanent no-charge tier for simple surveys, forms and quizzes. It allows unlimited surveys with up to ten questions each, and it shows only a limited number of responses per survey, even when more responses are collected. SurveyMonkey says you can stay on it as long as you want, and no credit card is needed to keep it running.
Does SurveyMonkey have a free version?
Yes. The free version is the Basic plan: no credit card required, unlimited surveys, ten questions per survey and limited visible responses. Paid tiers add headroom and analysis tools, but the free tier never expires, so cancelling a paid subscription returns you to a working account rather than a locked one. That is the practical difference between a standing plan and a trial.
What is SurveyMonkey Enterprise?
SurveyMonkey Enterprise is the plan built for large organizations, best suited to teams with five or more users. It adds single sign-on, HIPAA and GDPR compliance, regional hosting, administrative controls for users and data governance, reporting, and integrations with apps such as Salesforce and Power BI. Terms are arranged with the vendor rather than through self-serve checkout, so the auto-renew toggle is not the mechanism there.
Does SurveyMonkey cost money?
SurveyMonkey does charge money beyond the Basic plan. Its pricing pages list a monthly personal tier billed month to month and an annual tier billed once a year at a lower effective monthly rate, and an extra per-response charge applies when a plan's response limits are exceeded in a billing cycle. The Basic plan itself carries no charge at any point, before or after a cancellation.
Where these facts come from
- surveymonkey.com. surveymonkey.com/pricing/individual/details/.
- surveymonkey.com. surveymonkey.com/pricing/individual/details/.
- surveymonkey.com. surveymonkey.com/pricing/.
- help.surveymonkey.com. help.surveymonkey.com/en/surveymonkey/billing/account-cancelation/.
- help.surveymonkey.com. help.surveymonkey.com/en/surveymonkey/billing/eu-subscription-cancellation-policy/.
This page does not quote prices, fees or currency amounts, even where a source names them. It cannot cancel a subscription on your behalf, and it never teaches ways to slip past a platform's checks or to make manufactured poll responses look genuine. What it offers instead is the documented mechanics of downgrading and the documented absence of automatic refunds.
X prohibits coordinating with or compensating others to inflate engagement metrics, and it names Polls among the features covered. The Pet Industry Business Awards name the consequence in their own contest: a business may be investigated, lose votes or be disqualified on reasonable evidence of purchased votes. No seller can stop an organiser from doing that.
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