Workspace Lifecycle

A hosted workspace is not running all the time. One that has been quiet scales to zero, and one that stays quiet for much longer eventually becomes a candidate for removal. Nothing is destroyed in one step: a workspace sleeps, is warned and marked visibly, and only then is anything deleted. Every stage before the last is reversible.

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Sleep and wake

A hosted workspace that has been quiet for a while scales to zero — it goes to sleep. Nothing is lost while it sleeps, and you do not have to do anything to bring it back: opening it wakes it. While it starts, the app shows a Waking screen in place of the Overview: It went to sleep after a quiet spell. Starting it back up usually takes under a minute, and nothing was lost. A RESTORING · m:ss counter under the message tracks how long it has been going, and keeps counting across a reload or a route change rather than restarting. After about 75 seconds the message changes to Still waking up. This one is taking longer than usual, but your data is safe. A few details worth knowing:

• Every way in wakes it. Switching workspaces in the picker, reloading the page, and opening a direct URL all go through the same wake, and the wake survives a reload rather than treating a still-cold workspace as an ordinary reconnect.
• A workspace that falls asleep mid-session is caught. If it goes to sleep while your tab is open, the next request notices, wakes it, and retries once it is serving.
• The wait is bounded. A workspace that never comes back lands on an error within minutes rather than spinning forever: didn’t wake up — It was asleep and we asked it to start, but it hasn’t come online. Try again, or sign out and back in.
• The workspace badge says which state it is in. A dashed, hollow badge means not running; its accessible label reads running, asleep, waking up, or no active subscription. In the workspace picker each row spells it out under the name — Asleep · wakes when you open it, Waking up…, Didn’t wake up, or No active subscription.
• Not every page takes over the screen. The full Waking screen replaces the content of the Overview and of every page that reads from the workspace: Datasets, Search, Skills, Graph, Sessions, Analytics, Activity, and the Graph Model editor. Pages that do not touch the workspace stay usable while it starts — Memory Coverage is one of them, and shows only the provisioning banner.

A fetch that fails just after a wake names that as the likely cause rather than reporting a flat error: Activity and Analytics both read Couldn’t load activity. If the workspace was asleep it may still be starting up; otherwise the activity endpoint is not answering.

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When a workspace goes to sleep

On Cognee Cloud, a workspace is put to sleep once it has been idle for 3 days, and the sweep that does it runs every two hours — so a workspace crossing that line is caught within a couple of hours rather than a day later. Members are emailed when it happens. Two things about this are deliberate:

• It is purely about idleness. A paid workspace is not exempt: sleeping is reversible and costs nothing to undo, so an idle workspace of any kind scales to zero rather than burning compute.
• Nothing is deleted or moved. The database, the files, the graph, the members, and the API keys are all exactly as you left them; only the compute stops.

Anything that reads from the workspace wakes it — opening it in the app, switching to it in the workspace picker, or any authenticated API call. A request without credentials does not wake it, and neither do health or documentation probes, so a passing scanner cannot keep a workspace running. A woken workspace is typically serving again in well under a minute.

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If a workspace stays idle

Sleeping indefinitely is not free — the storage behind a workspace still costs something — so the lifecycle continues past sleep: Two guarantees hold across this path:

• A workspace whose members were never successfully warned never becomes deletable. The clock runs from when members were actually told, so a late notice does not shorten anyone’s grace period.
• Workspaces with credit purchases or a saved payment method are excluded from the final step. A workspace that has ever bought token credits — or whose owner has — or that has a saved payment method is never destroyed by this path, because a prepaid balance is held against the workspace. Buying credits during the grace period rescues it.

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Deleting a workspace yourself

Deletion you ask for is immediate, not staged. Workspace settings → delete workspace removes the workspace and all of its data right away — This will permanently delete the workspace and all its data. This cannot be undone. There is nothing scheduled and nothing to cancel, and the workspace’s paid seat is released from your subscription as soon as it succeeds. Two exceptions: your Personal Workspace cannot be deleted, and only the owner can delete a workspace. Deleting your account removes every workspace you own along with all of their data. See Settings and Account & Billing.

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