We have both paid and free tenant accounts. If I downgrade the paid account to free, will the search be switched off?
The user search by itself is available to all accounts, some accounts do have restricted ability to perform searches over certain fields added to the user metadata. The restrictions were initially applied automatically in response to an outage and based on the criteria mentioned in this documentation page which indeed contains a condition associated with subscription level. However, it was not the sole criteria as tenant creation date is also meaningful. In addition, at this time there are already non-paid subscriptions that still have the ability to perform unrestricted search because they were already making use of it in a non-abnormal way and as stated in the original incident we try our best to accommodate for those requests. In conclusion, to answer your question directly I’m unaware of any automatic or manual process that would immediately restrict search over custom fields due to the downgrade in subscription.