Cancelling ends the billing; deleting removes the account. Plenty of people do the first, believe it took care of the second, and leave years of chat sitting on servers run by a company they have stopped thinking about.
The sequence to follow
1. Export first, if an export exists. Once the account is gone, nothing comes back. Run the data download if there is one, then open the file to make sure it contains your conversations and not simply your billing history.
2. Clear any saved payment details, if the app lets you do that separately.
3. Cancel the plan and read the confirmation, paying attention to whether access continues until the paid period ends.
4. Delete the account. This is a distinct step, typically on another settings page, and some apps only accept it by email.
5. Confirm it. Try signing in a week later. If the password still works, the account survived.
Skipping the first step is permanent. Skipping the last is how people discover, twelve months later, that nothing ever happened.
What tends to remain
Even when a company honours a deletion, not everything disappears on the spot:
- Backups age out on their own schedule, often after 30 to 90 days.
- Billing records stay because tax and accounting rules demand it. That is routine and not up for negotiation.
- Moderation logs of flagged content are frequently kept longer.
- Generated images may be stored apart from the chats, so one request may not cover them.
- Aggregated or anonymized data based on your activity usually remains, and deletion rights generally do not reach it.
Reasonably, your chats and profile should go quickly and the rest should follow a documented schedule. It is not reasonable to expect a company bound by a legal retention duty to ignore it on your behalf.
When the app makes it difficult
Self-service deletion is standard among apps worth using. If yours lacks it, you still have options.
Canada's federal privacy law for businesses, PIPEDA, does not contain a stand-alone right to erasure like the GDPR's. It does let you withdraw your consent to an organization using your personal information, and it says information that is no longer needed for its stated purpose should be destroyed, erased or made anonymous. You can also ask the company for the personal information it holds about you. It must answer within 30 days (it may extend by up to 30 more, but must tell you so in that first month), and if it refuses it has to explain why and tell you that you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
In Quebec, Law 25 adds more. Since September 2024 you can ask an organization for your computerized personal information in a structured, commonly used format, and the Commission d'accès à l'information handles complaints.
In practice, email the privacy contact listed in the policy. State that you are withdrawing consent and requesting deletion of your account and personal information, name PIPEDA (or Law 25 if you live in Quebec), and save the message. If the reply is inadequate, the OPC takes complaints about how businesses handle personal information.
The part people rarely expect
For some people, deleting a companion they spoke to every day for months is more than paperwork, and it would be false to say otherwise. If it affects you, that is an ordinary response to months of routine and reflects nothing wrong with you.
Exporting the conversation beforehand makes the choice easier to live with in the way that matters: you keep what was said, and it no longer sits on another party's server. Replika raises this question most often, as the app most likely to hold years of history.
Moving to another app rather than leaving altogether? Our ranking is the short list.
