Hi Becky,
Sorry for the confusion here and that we did not reply to your email, we get a lot of spam and it sounds like we missed your email – very sorry! We try to reply to all emails with 24 to 48 hours so that yours got missed completely is a big problem and not normal for us.
After an upgrade ends you can definitely return back to the free version and continue to use statcounter at no cost, and we have many members who do this.
If you want to work on this again let me know!
Kind regards,
Rory
Statcounter team