The free use of www.soscisurvey.de is limited to a survey adminsitration period of 2 years. While SoSci Survey did not check this limitation in the past, it does since a recent update.
The main reason is that SoSci Survey becomes inefficient of projects are running too long, especially if the are edited every year for a "new round". For such projects, it's a much better solution to create a copy.
There are some research projects who have good reasons for collecting data longer. Such projects shall send a short summary including the URL and planned field time to info@soscisurvey.de
Am I able to move the free projects over to my paid account?
Checking for the limitation was not introduced to press surveys into paid use. However, we still welcome, if you chose that option :) Upon request to info@soscisurvey.de we can change the categorization of a project to paid use.
Am I going to lose the data for the free projects after the survey administration period ends?
You should not use www.soscisurvey.de as data archive, there are better solutions for that, such as OSF. However, the general deletion rules for collected data apply, independently if you exceeded the two-year-limit or not. On www.soscisurvey.de projects will be archived (that is, the collected data is deleted and the questionnaire is stored as XML) three months after the most recent login to the project.