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Data Retention

Contact keeps your message history for a period set by your plan. Older data is removed automatically by a daily sweep.

Retention is a maximum age, not a guarantee of deletion at that instant: the sweep runs once a day, so data may persist a few hours past the window.

What the window covers

Your plan's window applies to:

• Messages: everything entities publish, including their payloads and tags
• Flows: flow records share the message window, so a message and the flow it

belongs to expire together

• Files: file transfers follow the same window (see

File Transfer for the separate rule about files being deleted once downloaded)

Three things are deliberately not tied to your plan:

• Audit logs are kept for 90 days on every plan. Shortening them for smaller

plans would make security incidents harder to investigate for exactly the accounts least able to absorb one.

• Webhook delivery events are kept for 30 days on every plan, so a delivery

failure stays diagnosable regardless of tier.

• Undelivered messages queued for an offline device are held for 90 days

regardless of plan. A device that is offline longer than your retention window still receives its queue when it reconnects; the queue is not history.

• Device vitals — heartbeats and command acknowledgements — are kept for

14 days on every plan, rather than your plan's window. These are the messages your devices send to stay visible and to report deployment state, and they are never charged against your data limit and never blocked by it. Keeping a fortnight of them covers the device health and uptime views without a year of keepalives consuming the allowance you are paying for. Your own telemetry — anything an entity publishes — is unaffected and keeps the full window above.

What you see in the app

Time-range pickers only offer ranges your plan can actually cover. The next range up is shown but locked, with the plan that provides it:

🔒 Last 90 Days (Standard)

If a query returns nothing because you asked for more history than your plan retains, Contact says so rather than showing an empty list.

Links and saved filters that point past your window are pulled back to the longest range you have, so they return results instead of appearing broken.

Upgrading

Upgrading extends the window from that point forward. It does not restore data already removed: once the sweep has deleted a message it is gone, and there is no undelete.

If you need history you are close to losing, upgrade before it ages out.

Downgrading

Downgrading does not delete your history immediately. For 30 days after a downgrade your previous, longer window still applies, which gives you time to reconsider, or to ask us for a copy of anything you need to keep.

For example, moving from Pro (180 days) to Free (7 days):

• Your full 180 days of history stays available for 30 days
• After 30 days the Free window takes effect and anything older than 7 days is

removed on the next sweep

Upgrading again during those 30 days cancels the countdown.

Manually billed accounts

Accounts on negotiated billing use whatever retention their agreement specifies. If no retention is set for such an account, its history is left alone rather than swept on a plan window.

Related

• Messages Overview: how messages are stored and queried
• File Transfer: the separate lifecycle for files
• Pricing: current plans and windows

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