Domains, Contracts, and Permits Expire and Nobody Notices

There's a kind of problem that never comes up in a meeting until the day it blows up: something reaching the end of its validity. The website suddenly won't load. Company email stops. A vendor stops serving you because the subscription didn't renew. Or a contract turns out to have renewed itself for another year, because the notice deadline passed.

What makes it dangerous isn't the date. The date is written down all over the place. What's dangerous is that nobody owns the date.

What quietly has an expiry date

Domains

If a domain passes its expiry date, the website and email using that domain risk going down with it. For gTLD domains like .com, ICANN's policy requires registrars to notify the domain owner at least twice before expiry (about a month and about a week before), and at least once more within five days afterwards. If the domain is deleted, there's a 30-day redemption period, but during that time its DNS is switched off, so the website and email still don't work. Once that period passes, the domain can become available for someone else to register. Country-code extensions like .id have their own rules from their operators, so check with your registrar.

The catch is that those notices go to the registered email. If that's the developer who originally registered the domain, or an employee who has since left, the notice reaches the wrong person.

SSL certificates

The SSL/TLS certificate that lets your site load over https also has an expiry date, and the validity period keeps getting shorter. According to the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements (the result of Ballot SC-081v3, adopted in April 2025), public certificates that used to be valid for up to 398 days are now capped at 200 days since March 15, 2026, then 100 days from March 15, 2027, and 47 days from March 15, 2029.

Maximum validity of public SSL/TLS certificates(days)

• Before March 15, 2026398 days
• Since March 15, 2026 (now)200 days
• From March 15, 2027100 days
• From March 15, 202947 days

If your website uses hosting or a service that renews certificates automatically, you may not notice any of this. But if your certificate is bought and installed manually, or used on your own server, the renewal schedule is now much tighter. And if one gets missed, the consequences can be big: in February 2020, Microsoft Teams was unusable for about three hours because of an expired authentication certificate. If even Microsoft can miss one, any business can.

Hosting and software subscriptions

Automatic renewal depends on a valid payment card. A card expires, hits its limit, or gets replaced after being lost, and the renewal fails with nobody knowing until the service stops. Make sure failed-payment notices go to an email that people actually read, not an inbox that never gets opened.

Vendor and lease contracts

Many contracts have an automatic renewal clause or a notice deadline for ending or renegotiating. Past that date, you're tied in for another term or you lose the chance to renegotiate. What's worth recording isn't just the date the contract ends, but the last date to act.

Trademarks

This is the easiest to forget because the term is so long. Law No. 20 of 2016 on Trademarks and Geographical Indications (Article 35) says a registered trademark is protected for 10 years from the Date of Receipt, meaning the date the application was received with the minimum requirements met (Article 1, point 16), which is earlier than the date the certificate was issued. Renewal is filed within the 6 months before the term ends. It can still be filed up to 6 months afterwards, but with the fee plus a fine equal to the renewal fee. For a trademark that is a company logo or emblem, Article 38 says it's enough to pay the renewal fee within the 6 months before expiry, as long as there's no dispute.

This is a summary for orientation, not legal advice. Check your trademark's dates directly with DJKI (Indonesia's Directorate General of Intellectual Property) or an intellectual property consultant.

Employee contracts, certifications, licenses, and policies

Fixed-term employee contracts, team certifications, software licenses, and insurance policies all have dates that are just as easy to miss. The exact rules differ for each type, so ask HR or the relevant consultant, and put the dates in the same list.

Why it keeps getting missed: not forgetfulness, nobody owns it

The same pattern shows up in almost every case:

• Notices go to the wrong person. The registered email belongs to the developer who built the website, or an employee who has resigned. This ties into accounts needing to be in your name, which I cover in another article.
• There's no single list. The dates are scattered: in email, in contract PDFs, in one person's head.
• The dates are too far apart or too frequent. A 10-year trademark is easy to forget, and a 200-day certificate comes around so often it's easy to put off with "later."
• People change. The person who knew the dates leaves, and the knowledge leaves with them, much like the problem in When the Company's AI Resigns Along With the Employee.

A simple tracking list in Google Sheets

One spreadsheet is enough to start. The columns I suggest:

Add automatic colors: red when 30 days or fewer remain, yellow when 90 days or fewer remain. Then set staged reminders, for example 90, 30, and 7 days before the last date to act. Those numbers are my own rule of thumb, so adjust them to how long each item's process takes: a trademark, for instance, needs to start earlier than a domain.

Start with the cheapest option: Google Calendar. Create a recurring event and invite two people. Once the list starts to grow, reminders can be sent automatically from the same sheet by email or WhatsApp. That's the pattern I used in the boarding house finance system, where the management team gets a notification 30 days before a contract ends, and in the team task reminder system, where the schedule and recipients are managed from the sheet without touching code.

For internal reminders, email or Calendar is free and usually enough. WhatsApp helps for people who rarely check email, but it has costs and risks, which I cover in WhatsApp API Billed Per Message: Stick With It or Switch to an Unofficial Gateway?.

Habits that keep the list alive

• One owner of the list and one backup, with a 15-minute review every month.
• Check the accounts and notification emails whenever an employee joins or leaves.
• Update the date as soon as a renewal is done, and keep the proof of payment in the same folder.
• Turn on automatic renewal where it's available, but still record it in the list, because cards can fail.

Wrapping up

There's nothing glamorous about an expiry list. But the cost of being late is higher than the cost of writing things down: a website that's down, email that stops, or trademark protection that lapses. One afternoon building the list now is far cheaper than one panicked day later.

If you'd like help building the list, or the automatic reminders, tell me about your situation first.