The full answer
Protection has no end date: there is no length to pick when you set it up, no calendar date it runs to, and nothing that finishes on its own. It ends in exactly two ways. You ask to end protection and the request is granted, or your subscription lapses and the block comes off 72 hours later. Every clock in both of those is a deadline on Fold’em’s server, and your phone only reads it.
It runs until you end it
Protection has no end date. There is no length to pick when you set it up, no calendar date it counts toward, and no morning on which it finishes because you chose that morning months earlier. You start it, and it holds.
That is deliberate and it is the whole answer. A date in the future is a date you can wait out, and the days in front of it become days spent counting rather than days spent not gambling. So Fold’em holds until you decide it should stop, and deciding is something you do in the open, with a wait on it, and with the person holding your key if you named one.
The two ways it ends
You ask to end protection, and the request is granted. If somebody holds your key, you ask and they decide. Their agreement starts a wait of 48 hours, and at the end of it you can end protection. If nobody holds your key, the wait is seven days from the moment you ask. Either way the ready request waits seven days for you and closes if you never use it, and nothing about what is blocked changes anywhere along the way.
Your subscription lapses. If the subscription stops, the server opens a window and the block comes off 72 hours later. That is the one end that arrives without you turning anything, and it is the subject of its own page.
Your subscription is not your protection
The subscription is what keeps the service running. It is not what commits you, and its length is not a length of protection: buying a longer subscription does not commit you for longer, and buying a shorter one shortens nothing, because there is no length anywhere to shorten.
The two are joined at exactly one point and it runs the other way, from money to blocking and never back. Stop paying and the lapse window above starts. Nothing you do on the billing side creates, extends or releases protection.
The count is a different thing
The number on Today that says how long you have been gambling free is not a reading of your protection. It runs from your last bet, and the only thing that moves it is your own admission that you gambled. Ending protection does not touch it, and starting again does not restart it.
So the two questions come apart on purpose. How long protection has held is a fact about your account. How long you have been gambling free is a fact about you, and it is yours whatever happens to your protection.
What this does not do
Having no end date does not make protection permanent, and nothing here pretends otherwise: the way out is in the app, it is meant to be findable, and what stands in front of it is a wait rather than a wall. It also does not change what is blocked. The apps, the sites and the layers are chosen separately, and how long you have held has never been an input to any of them. Deleting Fold’em does not end protection, because protection is not stored in the app. And none of this reaches past this phone: a second device, a desktop, a betting shop and cash are outside every part of it.
Write to us and a person reads it. We answer within two working days, and we would rather hear the question twice than not at all.