None of this is really relevant - Shopify is a paid service, has always been a paid service, and clearly markets itself as a paid service. Just because it's cheap for them to store information doesn't mean you should expect them to do it for you. They only want to deal with paying customers, so when you elect to stop being a paying customer, they get rid of your information. That is a perfectly reasonable business practice - not "hostile" as the comment I was responding to called it.
It is relevant, but as it happens these days, you read only the first line of my comment. I was agreeing with you (I can read longer comments) and was thinking of ways how to resolve it if you want to pay nothing or much less. I never said they have to store anything for free (no one has to) but you can imagine some kind of glacier storage for $9/year or something; it seems they already do that but don't tell you about it anyway considering comments from others.
