On 22 August 2026 I started a fourteen-day trial of Manatal (affiliate link). In the review and in the comparison with Breezy HR I wrote the same thing twice. There is no free plan underneath this trial, and nothing in the product tells you what happens when the countdown reaches zero. I said I would find out on 5 September and write it up.

This is that write-up. At 22:50 Japan time on 5 September I opened the account. There was no dashboard. The product had been replaced by a single page — a headline, a plan picker, and a card form already open on the right.

The short version

• The whole product becomes one checkout. Not a reduced view of the app, not a read-only mode. The product URL I tried — the candidate list, on two separate days — was rewritten to /subscription-end both times.
• The page defaults to $420 a year. Enterprise, billed annually, one seat. That is neither the cheapest plan nor the one most small teams would buy.
• There is no export, no account deletion, and no cancel. The three links at the foot of the page are Pricing, Need help? and Logout.
• Nothing tells you how long your data will be kept. Neither the page nor the two warning emails says anything about deletion, retention or a grace period.
• It was announced, but never as a date. Two emails warned me, and both were accurate. Neither gave a calendar date — one said 3 days left, the other said tomorrow. Nor does the interface. This is not an ambush; it is a cliff you have to work out the date of.
• A day later, nothing had moved. I checked again on 6 September. Same page, same defaults, same three links.

I had exported my candidates on 27 August, mid-trial, as insurance. That turned out to be the only reason this article is not about losing data.

The emails were accurate

Two messages arrived before the end, both from contact@manatal.com:

The subject line of the second was your free trial on Manatal ends tomorrow! — ends, future tense, pointing at 5 September, which is exactly fourteen days after 22 August. Manatal said when the trial would end and the trial ended then.

Notice what neither email contains: a date. One counts days, the other says “tomorrow”. The interface counts days too — Free trial 14 days left — and I could never find the end date written anywhere as a date. Both messages arrived at about 19:50 in the evening, Japan time. If you want the deadline in a form you can plan around, you have to derive it yourself from the timestamp on an email.

The body of the second email is worth quoting, because the product later did precisely what it says:

In order to maintain access to all your valuable information (departments, jobs, candidates…) you will need to start using Manatal on a paid subscription.

I want to be careful about one thing here. I logged in at 22:50 on the 5th and it was already over, but I had not checked earlier that day. So I cannot tell you whether the account was usable during business hours on the last day. What I can tell you is that on the day an email called “the last day”, the product was gone by the evening.

The product is now a payment page

The screen that replaces the application reads:

Your free trial has ended Subscribe to continue leveraging the best recruitment software!

Below that is a plan picker, and on the right a Stripe form with the card-number field already rendered, the country set to Japan, and a Secure Checkout badge. The defaults matter, because a default is a recommendation nobody has to defend:

The cheapest plan, Professional at $15 per seat per month, is on the same screen, one click away, and I want to say plainly that it is not hidden. But it is not the one the page arrives with. A single-user account that has just run out of trial is shown a $420 annual commitment first, on the middle of the three tiers rather than the entry one.

There is one more thing on that screen worth reading, because it tells you what you were evaluating for two weeks:

By selecting Enterprise you will not have access to Enterprise Plus features such as Groups, SSO and API.

“Will not have access” is how you describe losing something you currently have. Combined with the Enterprise pre-selection, it is the clearest indication I have found that the trial runs above the plan a small team would buy — which is the caveat I attached to every capability in the review.

The label says 10% off. The discount is 7% to 21%.

Switching the toggle to Monthly gives you the other half of the price list. Both halves, photographed on the same day:

The button is labelled Annually (10% OFF) for all three. The badge is accurate for exactly one plan, and it happens to be the one the page selects for you. It is not a false claim so much as one label doing duty for three different numbers — and the direction of the error is worth noting: the cheapest plan is a better annual deal than advertised, and the most expensive one is worse.

While I was on that screen I also read the feature lines under each plan, which I had not transcribed during the trial. Professional — the $15 tier — is capped at Up to 15 jobs per account and Up to 10,000 candidates. Enterprise says Unlimited for both. If you priced Manatal at $15 a seat in your head, those two ceilings belong in the calculation.

Three links, and none of them is your data

The SUBSCRIBE NOW button sits greyed out. I did not type a card number, so I cannot tell you what un-greys it. At the very bottom of the page there are three links:

Pricing · Need help? · Logout

That is the complete list of things you can do without paying. Look at what is absent:

• No export. The candidates, jobs and departments are behind the paywall, and there is no “download your data” link anywhere on the page.
• No delete. You cannot remove the account, and you cannot remove what is in it.
• No cancel. There is nothing to cancel, because the trial took no card — which is a real point in Manatal’s favour that I will come back to.

I tried the product URLs directly. Opening the candidate list rewrote the address bar to app.manatal.com/subscription-end and served the same payment page. Not an error, not a locked panel inside the app — a redirect. The product does not degrade. It is replaced.

Compare that with what happens on the other side of this test. When I downgraded Breezy HR to its free plan, thirteen settings grew a padlock and the export kept working; I could still get my candidates out on the $0 tier. That is the question I said I would answer here, so: on Manatal, day fifteen, you cannot.

What nobody will tell you is how long the data stays

The email says you need a subscription “to maintain access to all your valuable information”. Access, then, is what payment buys. So the obvious follow-up is: for how long is that information still there to have access to?

Nothing answers this. Not the payment page, not either warning email. I looked for will be deleted, for a retention period, for a grace window, for 30 days. None of it is on the screen. During the trial I had already noticed that the Data Management settings offered no retention or auto-deletion controls either.

To be exact about what I am claiming: I am not saying Manatal deletes your data. I have no evidence of that, and the account was still intact on 6 September. I am saying that a product holding candidate records — real people’s names, phone numbers and CVs — tells the person who put them there nothing at all about how long they will be kept once the paying stops. That is a gap in what is communicated, not a proven act.

Manatal is not alone in this. Eleven days later my BambooHR trial ended too, and there it was worse: the account became a blank page, and none of the fifteen emails BambooHR sent me said a word about the data either.

The day after: nothing moved

I opened the account again on 6 September and checked it against the values I had transcribed the night before. The headline, the billing default, the pre-selected plan, the seat count, the total, the greyed-out button and the three links were all identical. No retention notice had appeared. The direct-URL redirect behaved the same way for a second day, which tells me it is the designed behaviour and not a first-night glitch.

One limitation: the browser session from the 5th was still valid, so the app went straight to the payment page without asking me to sign in. I therefore cannot tell you that logging in still works — only that the account had not been closed and the session had not been invalidated.

Two days is two days. I am not going to tell you what this account looks like in a month.

What Manatal got right here

It would be easy to write this as a trap, and it is not one:

• The trial takes no card. Nobody gets charged automatically at the end of a Manatal trial. Breezy, for comparison, wanted a billing address and a card number from me even to move down to its $0 plan. The cliff here is abrupt precisely because there is no payment relationship running in the background.
• The end date was announced twice and both messages were accurate.
• The email said access would require a subscription, and then access required a subscription. The product did what the warning said it would do.
• The cheapest plan is present and selectable on the same screen as the default.

What is missing is the part between “your trial is over” and “pay us”: some way to take your own data with you, or to close the account, or to know how long you have. The fourteen-day countdown in the interface never showed a date either — only Free trial 14 days left, ticking down — so the emails were the only place the deadline existed in a form you could plan around.

If you are trialling Manatal right now

1. Export your candidates before the last day, not on it. Every column, not the default view. On day fifteen the export button is on the other side of the paywall. I exported on 27 August, five days in, and that is the only reason I lost nothing. Then open the file: thirty of its fifty-two columns came out empty, which is worth knowing before you rely on it.
2. Copy out anything you built inside the product — pipelines, departments, custom fields — the same way. If you cannot open the app, you cannot read them.
3. Work out the end date and diarise it yourself. Nothing gives it to you as a date. The screen counts days down, the warning emails say “3 days left” and “tomorrow”, and they arrive in the evening.
4. Decide about the $15 plan before the trial ends, while you can still see the product. Once it ends, the page you are deciding from is a checkout that opens on $420 a year, and the tier you tested is not the tier you are being quoted.
5. If you are comparing against a tool with a free plan, weigh the exit, not just the price. For a small team that hires in bursts, “there is no plan to fall back to” is the constraint that will bite. It is also the axis these two products differ on most.

Observed on 5 September 2026 at 22:50 JST and 6 September 2026, on a single-seat Manatal account whose fourteen-day trial began on 22 August 2026. Prices are those displayed on the account’s own subscription screen on 6 September 2026.

Disclosure: the Manatal link in this post pays me a commission if you sign up through it, and it is marked where it appears above. It costs you nothing extra, it did not change a word of what this post says, and I do not accept payment in exchange for favourable coverage. Every other link here is an ordinary one.