Hello Lindsay,
Thanks for your message. This is a commercial topic that we are happy to discuss more with you through our official website in case you will have additional questions.
We do confirm that renewals are never mandatory. If your license is expired, we only suggest to disable the auto-updates for our plugin, or this would be a downgrade to the free version. We display an alert when clicking the button to install an update for Vik Rent Items in case your license is expired. This alert message is only displayed in the plugin updates page of the wp-admin section, for the rest you will never see any annoying banner in your website, nor in the front-end section, nor in the back-end. When the license has expired you only lose access to pro-updates as you said.
The downgrade or upgrade processes will never make you lose any data, and as you also assumed, a later renewal made whenever you need to install a specific and interesting update, would work just fine. You need to have an active license only when you want to install a future release, if not, you can just stay with your current Pro version.
We invite you to reach out to our support team through our website for any other questions related to the commercial version of the plugin.
Thank you!
The VikWP Team
