Tips and tricks: What happens when your eHarmony subscription expires

Here is the most complete summary of what happens when a paid subscription lapses or ends.

Paid members, read this, in case you want to send a message to a match who has expired his or her subscription or to a nonpaying member.

When your subscription lapses:

You are disabled from all forms of communicating to individual matches, i.e., sending questions, answers, Must Haves and Can’t Stand lists, nudges and open communication messages. Basically you can only wait for matches to send you information, not the other way around.
You cannot initiate or accept FastTrack requests.
You cannot send or read the first message in Open Communication.
You can still communicate to ALL your matches by editing any of your About Me answers, your occupation or your city. Tip: Your “occupation” is the #1 way to broadcast a message to all your matches.
The “Find New Matches” button stops working. You may still receive matches though — the matching software is weird and screwed up. (Which is why paid members still get matched to maria (fortcollins, CO).)
Paid members cannot send you a Final Message when you close them. (See The Final Message bug for more details.)
You lose the ability to see photos of matches. (Did you remember to save them to your hard drive?)
You start receiving eHarmony Spam, such as “Are you a Skeptic?”
You get an extra $20-$30 on your monthly budget to spend on other things.

You will still receive email notices of any response from paid members. When you sign in, you can still review all previous questions, answers and messages. Everything else stays the same.

Tip: If a match stops responding during the OPEN communication stage, her subscription might have expired. Because she still receives email notifications when you send her messages, THEREFORE, think about sending her your email address or your MSN/YM handle.