Project lifecycle

Inspect the project banner before attempting recovery. A read-only project and a paused project have different behavior.

State	Effect	How to restore
Free read-only	Queries continue; mutations are blocked.	Upgrade in Settings → Plan, or bring usage under the limits.
Manual pause	GraphQL, automations, and Chat are stopped.	Settings → General → Unpause project.
Spending pause	Service stopped after the configured usage boundary.	Raise the limit or change the mode in spend management.
Read-only for payment	Queries continue; changes and the agent are stopped.	Pay the overdue invoice. See failed payments.
Paused for payment	GraphQL, automations, and Chat are stopped.	Pay the overdue invoice. See failed payments.

Pause deliberately

Use General settings when you intend to pause a project. Communicate the impact to users and dependent integrations first. A pause affects backend work, even when the Studio still loads.

Delete deliberately

Before using Delete, verify the team and project ID, understand the confirmation’s consequences, and preserve any data you need through supported export tools. A dataset export is not a promise of full project restoration. Recreating application code does not recover deleted project data or configuration.

Verify restoration

After resolving the stated cause, reopen Studio and perform a small read. Then verify an intended write in development data where appropriate. If the same restriction remains, capture the project ID and message for support.