How Long Does Chatfuel Keep My Data?
Chatfuel retains different types of data for different periods, depending on the data category, legal requirements, and your workspace settings.
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Overview
Chatfuel retains different types of data for different periods, depending on the data category, legal requirements, and your workspace settings. Here's a breakdown of what we keep and for how long.
Retention Periods
| Data Type | Retention Period |
|---|---|
| Conversation content (messages, metadata) | 6 months by default. Configurable per workspace between 1 and 6 months |
| Contacts and leads | While workspace is active. Inactive records auto-archived after 6 months, deleted 90 days later |
| Account data (workspace name, plan, billing contacts) | Life of contract + 12 months |
| User identity and auth (name, email, role) | Life of account + 12 months |
| Configuration and automation (flows, bots, integrations) | While workspace is active + 90 days after account deletion (grace period) |
| Audit and operational logs | 6 months |
| Billing and finance (invoices, payments) | 7 years (accounting and tax obligations) |
Automatic Deletion
Chatfuel automatically handles data cleanup:
- Conversation content older than your workspace retention setting is hard-deleted in daily rolling jobs
- Inactive contact profiles are auto-archived after 6 months and permanently deleted 90 days later (unless reactivated)
- Orphaned media references are purged within 7 days
What Happens When You Delete Your Account
- Verification — we confirm you're the workspace owner or authorized admin
- Soft lock — access and billing suspended immediately
- Grace period — 30 days to reactivate and export your data
- Hard deletion — after day 30, production data is purged within 7 days
- Backups — residual backup copies expire within the standard 35-day backup retention window
- Subprocessors — deletion requests are propagated to all third-party services
- Confirmation — we provide a deletion confirmation upon completion
Backups
- Encrypted backups run daily with a 35-day rolling retention
- Point-in-time recovery available for up to 7 days
- Backups are for disaster recovery only — they cannot be used to retrieve selectively deleted items
Special Requirements
Healthcare providers in Colombia should note that medical record retention requirements (15 years) may supersede platform defaults. Chatfuel supports extended retention configurations to meet regulatory obligations.