My shop ran on Printavo for years. This summer I moved 6,454 orders, 17,126 files and every payment out of it, and then I cancelled the account. It cost $469 a month by the end.
I was more worried during the move than I needed to be. Now that my own system has run the shop for two months, what I feel is relief. But a few things about the exit surprised me, and they are the kind of thing you want to know before you cancel, not after.
The API dies at cancellation, not after it
Support told me I would have five days of access after cancelling. That turned out to be true of the browser and false of the API.
My last successful sync ran at 8:30 in the morning. The cancellation was processed, and by 8:45 every API call returned “Account does not have API access.” About fifteen minutes. The web login kept working for the five days, and I was told I could buy a discounted month back if I needed longer. But anything scripted was over the moment the cancellation went through.
If your export depends on the API in any way, it has to be finished before you send the email. Not started. Finished.
What the API can give you, and what it cannot
The API is generous with the records. Every invoice and quote with its line items, sizes, imprints, notes, tags, due dates and totals. Customers with contacts and addresses. The mockups attached to line items. The order PDFs Printavo rendered for you. The full payment ledger, refunds and voids included. Message threads with their attachments.
All of that came out of my account. The records took about eight and a half hours to pull, the files about seven, and 17,126 files arrived with zero failures, including the original PDF for every single one of the 6,454 orders.
What the API cannot give you is everything under Financials and Analytics. The sales tax report. The quotes and invoices CSV. The payments and expenses CSV. Printavo has no report, analytics, tax or export endpoint at all, so none of that can be scripted. Someone on my team pulled every one of those by hand from the web interface while the account was still live.
Two traps inside that step. The CSV exports arrive by email. If what arrives is a download link rather than the file, that link needs a login that dies with the account, so an email sitting in your inbox is not a saved export; get the file itself out and save it. And the pricing matrices export one at a time; of the thirteen files we downloaded, five turned out to be byte-identical duplicates of others, so count the real matrices, not the downloads.
Export first, cancel second
The order of operations I would give anyone now:
- Pull the records and files by API while the account is live and paid. If you have a tech person, the tool I used is free and read-only: github.com/lamb92009/printavo-exporter. It is published as-is, with no support, because it was written for one shop’s exit and I am not going to be on the phone for yours. If you do not have a tech person, the next step matters more anyway.
- Pull the reports by hand from the web interface: sales tax for every open period, the two CSVs for the same periods, every pricing matrix, and any other report your shop actually looks at.
- Name every file with its source and its exact period, write a short README beside them, and keep one copy off the office computer.
- Then cancel.
Printavo’s own terms say that after termination the customer “shall have no further access to any Customer Data” and the company “may delete all Customer Data.” There is no stated export window. Read your own agreement, but plan as if the day you cancel is the day it is gone.
What I would tell myself in June
Three things.
The worry was mostly about the unknown, and the unknown was mostly the API and the reports. Once I knew which was which, the plan was a list.
The month of overlap before cancelling was worth every dollar. My shop worked out of the new system from July 10, and I did not cancel Printavo until August 14. It stayed open so I could check my work against it.
And the relief is real. The system I moved to is one I built for my own floor, which is a story for another day. The point for you is simpler: the data can be moved, all of it, if you do it in the right order.
The one-page version
I turned the export order above into a one-page checklist, with the exact menu paths for the reports the API will never give you. It is free.
Get the checklist: what to export before you cancel Printavo