Cancelling stops the money. Deleting removes the account. People do the first, assume it did the second, and leave years of conversation on a server belonging to a company they have stopped paying attention to.
Do it in this order
1. Export, if an export exists. Once the account is gone, nothing can be recovered. If the app offers a data download, run it first and check the file actually contains the conversations rather than a summary of your billing.
2. Remove payment details, where the app allows it independently.
3. Cancel the subscription and read the confirmation. Note whether access continues to the end of the period.
4. Delete the account — a separate action, usually in a different settings screen, sometimes only by email.
5. Verify. Try to log in a week later. An account that still accepts your password was not deleted.
Skipping step one is irreversible. Skipping step five is how people discover, a year later, that the request never completed.
What typically survives
Even an honoured deletion rarely removes everything at once:
- Backups roll off on their own schedule, commonly 30–90 days.
- Billing records are retained because tax law requires it. This is normal and not negotiable.
- Moderation records of flagged content are often kept longer.
- Generated images sometimes live in separate storage from the chat and are not always covered by the same request.
- Aggregated or anonymised data derived from your usage usually stays, and is generally outside the scope of a deletion right.
The reasonable expectation is that your conversations and profile disappear promptly, and that a documented tail exists for the rest. The unreasonable one is that a company with a legal retention duty will ignore it for you.
If the app makes it hard
Self-service deletion is the norm among apps worth using. When it is missing, you still have leverage:
In the EU and UK, a deletion request under GDPR must be answered within one month. In California and a growing number of US states, comparable rights apply. Write to the privacy contact in the policy, state plainly that this is a deletion request under the relevant law, and keep the email.
For the apps we cover on our Dutch and French editions, that route is the reliable one when a button is missing.
The part people do not expect
Deleting a companion you used daily for months is not a neutral administrative act for everyone, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. If it feels like something, that is a normal response to months of routine, not a sign that anything is wrong with you.
Exporting the conversation first makes the decision reversible in the only sense that matters — you keep what was said, without leaving it on someone else's server. Replika, being the app most likely to have accumulated years of history, is where this comes up most often.
If you are leaving one app for another rather than leaving the category, our ranking is the short list.
