When your CCcam line expires: what happens and how to renew

Published September 2026

Lines end on a fixed date, with no stored card and no auto-renewal. What happens at expiry, how to check your date, and how extending differs from buying again.

Lines here end on a fixed date. There is no stored card, no automatic renewal and no grace period, which is deliberate but does mean the date matters more than it would with an ordinary subscription. Here is what actually happens, and what to do before it does.

What happens at the timestamp

A job runs every hour and blocks any line that has passed its expiry. In practice that means decoding stops within about an hour of the timestamp rather than at the stroke of it.

The status becomes blocked, which is the same word used when a line is blocked for a rule violation. The expiry date is how you tell the two apart: a line that stopped on its end date has simply run out, and a line that stopped well before its end date has not. If yours stopped early, the field guide to a dead line is the better place to start.

Months are 30 days

Durations count in 30-day months rather than calendar months. A 6-month line runs 180 days. A 12-month line runs 360 days. That is five days short of a year, which is enough to catch people out if they are counting on a calendar.

The exact end timestamp on the line is the thing that counts, so read it rather than calculating it. Our expiry checker gives you the date from your line details in a few seconds.

Lifetime lines are the exception. They never expire and are left out of every expiry job, so none of this applies to them.

You get warned, once a day, for the last two days

While a line is inside 48 hours of its expiry we email you once a day. Most people get two warnings. The email names the line and the exact expiry time.

That is the whole notification system. It is worth checking that the address you bought with is one you still read, because there is no second channel and no card on file to fall back on.

Extending versus buying again

These are two different things and the difference is the single most common misunderstanding.

Extending adds time to the line you already use. The username, password and both hostnames stay exactly as they are, so your receiver needs no attention at all. Nothing on the box changes. To do this, get in touch and ask us to extend it before the date arrives.

Buying a plan again creates a separate new line with a new username and a new password. Your receiver will not pick it up on its own, because as far as the server is concerned it is a different account. That is intended rather than a quirk: a second purchase is a second account, which is exactly what you want when you are adding a receiver to the household rather than continuing an existing line.

So the two paths are:

• Continuing the line you already use: ask us to extend it.
• Adding another line alongside it: buy a plan.

The one case where a purchase continues a line

If you buy while your trial is still running, and check out with the same email address, your first room keeps the trial’s username, password and servers. Only the expiry moves, and your receiver needs no change. That is the whole point of running a free 3-day trial rather than a demo: what you tested is what you keep.

Before the date arrives

Two practical things. Copy anything you still need off the line before it expires, because active lines are the only ones listed once the date passes. And if you are renewing, do it a day or two early rather than on the hour, so a quiet evening does not turn into a dark one.

If you are weighing whether to continue at all, what a line actually costs covers how to read a price, and the pricing page has the current plans.