The full answer
On day four, in the evening, the phone reminds you that the trial is ending; on day seven the subscription you chose renews at its own price. The trial is an entitlement like any other, so you can start protection during it and the block holds from that moment. What the trial pays for is the app, not the protection: your subscription renews on Apple's calendar, and your protection simply runs until it is ended.
Seven days, and three moments in them
The paywall offers a free week as a switch, when Apple says your account is eligible. With it on, nothing is taken on the day you start, and the price after that is whichever subscription you picked. The invite version of a subscription is the exception: it carries one free month instead of seven days, and the paywall shows that pair only once a redeemed invite code is applied.
On day four the phone raises a reminder in the evening. Day four is not a fixed number typed into the screen; it is the trial's length less a lead of three days, floored so it can never land on the day you bought. The same rule drives the reminder itself, which is why the timeline on the paywall and the notification that actually arrives cannot fall on different days.
On day seven the subscription renews, and Apple charges the card on file. Renewal is a subscription event and not a protection event: your protection carries on either way.
What the paywall states
With the trial switched on, the screen shows the same three moments as a line above the subscriptions: today you start free, on day 4 it reminds you, on day 7 the first payment lands. The button carries the trial's own length rather than a fixed phrase, because the app renders whatever the App Store says the product's introductory offer is. If a product ever shipped with no trial, the button and the timeline would say so instead of promising one.
The reminder comes from the phone, not from us
The trial reminder is scheduled on the phone that bought, by the app, at the moment the purchase succeeds, and only when the product bought actually carried an introductory free trial. No server sends it, and nothing about it travels anywhere.
It fires in the evening, local time, and says three things: the weekday your free trial ends, the price the subscription then renews at when the phone has it, and how to cancel, which is to open iPhone Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions. The weekday and the way to cancel are true whether or not you have already cancelled. The price is printed either way, so after you cancel it names a charge that will not be taken. If your entitlement changes, the pending reminder is cancelled and scheduled again the next time the app comes to the foreground.
How it arrives depends on one answer you gave during setup. Fold’em asks once for full notification permission at a declinable beat; if you allowed it, the reminder appears on your lock screen, and if you did not, it lands quietly in Notification Center with no sound and no banner. Either way it is the same reminder, and the switch that governs it is the master Notifications switch in Settings.
The plan is not the protection
These are two separate things, and it is worth keeping them apart. The plan is a subscription of one or twelve months, billed by Apple, which you can change or cancel in your Apple settings at any time. The protection is the commitment you made, and it has no end date at all: it runs until it is ended. Buying a twelve month subscription does not commit you for twelve months, and starting protection does not sign you up for anything longer than the subscription you bought. What links them is narrow and runs one way only: without a live subscription the app is not entitled to enforce, which is the lapse window below. Nothing runs the other way, and no subscription you buy sets or moves your protection.
If you cancel during the trial
Cancelling is done in your Apple settings and Fold’em is not asked. It turns auto renewal off, so the trial runs to its end and the subscription does not renew. What happens to the block afterwards is not nothing: protection needs both a live subscription and protection that is still running, so when the entitlement ends the server opens a lapse window of 72 hours and then releases the shields, and if someone holds your key, they are told the date protection would end. Renewing inside that window keeps everything where it was.
What this does not do
The trial does not end protection, and cancelling it ends protection only once the trial is over: the lapse window is the server's and runs on its own clock, so cancelling never opens anything sooner than 72 hours after the entitlement actually ends. Fold’em cannot cancel a subscription for you, cannot issue a refund and cannot see your payment details, because all three belong to Apple. It also cannot extend a trial; the length is set on the product in the App Store and the app only renders what the store reports.
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