This page gathers, in one place, how long GoChat keeps your data, what it stores where, and how to export or delete an individual contact. It exists so that you can answer your own customers’ questions without having to go looking through the rest of the documentation.
For how GoHyppo LLC handles personal data as a company, see the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Conditions.
How long conversations are kept
Message history is trimmed automatically. The period depends on who sent the message, not on the channel: it is the same across WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok, web chat, SMS and email.
| What | How long it is kept |
|---|---|
| Messages sent by the contact | 6 months |
| Messages sent by a human agent from Live Chat | 6 months |
| Messages sent by the bot | 3 months |
| WhatsApp media files (Meta Cloud API default) | 30 days |
| WhatsApp media files, with your own S3 storage connected | Same as the message history |
Two consequences worth knowing about:
- Live Chat search only covers the last 6 months. Messages older than that are not returned by the search, because they are no longer in the history.
- Bot messages disappear before contact messages do. A thread older than three months will show the contact’s side of the conversation without the bot’s replies.
What is kept for as long as the workspace is active
Trimming applies to message history, not to everything. The following stays until you delete it:
- Contact profiles: name, phone number, email address, channel identifiers, language, timezone.
- Custom user fields and tags.
- Segments, flows, templates, broadcasts and their delivery stats.
- Tickets and their notes.
- Call recordings, transcripts and AI summaries, stored against the contact record.
- Tables synced from an external database.
Synced tables are not a two-way mirror
When you sync a table from your own PostgreSQL database, GoChat keeps its copy independently of the source. Deleting a row or dropping the table in your database does not delete the synced copy in GoChat. If you sync a table that contains personal data, you have to delete it on the GoChat side as well — this matters directly when a contact asks you to erase their data.
Your own file storage (S3)
You can connect your own S3-compatible bucket so that media files are stored in infrastructure you control. When you do, the media retention period matches your message history instead of Meta’s 30-day default.
Use a private bucket, with access through the access key and secret you generate for GoChat, and grant the minimum permission the integration needs. Conversation files routinely contain personal data — names, photos, documents, voice notes — and a publicly readable bucket exposes all of it to anyone who has the URL.
Storage limits
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Maximum size per uploaded file | 10 MB |
| Media file storage, free plan | 100 MB |
| Media file storage, paid plan | 1 GB |
Cookies the web chat widget sets
The web chat widget writes a cookie in the visitor’s browser to recognize them across sessions and keep the conversation going. The cookie lasts 30 days and is refreshed on each visit.
If a visitor does not come back within those 30 days, the cookie expires and, with it, the link to that contact: a message sent to them after that point fails with “Message not sent because outside 30 days”, and their next conversation starts as a new contact. If you ask visitors to sign in through SSO and link the web chat user with their other channels, you can still reach them outside that window.
This is a first-party cookie of your website, not of GoChat’s. You need to declare it in your own cookie policy, and collect consent for it where your regulations require it.
Exporting or deleting a single contact
Open the contact in Bot Users. Underneath the profile image there are two actions:
- Download user data — exports everything stored about that contact.
- Delete user — removes the contact and their data.
These two actions are what you use to answer an access or erasure request under GDPR, Argentina’s Law 25.326, the LGPD or any comparable regime. You are the data controller for your contacts, so those requests come to you, not to us.
Closing a workspace
When a subscription is cancelled the workspace goes into read-only mode for 30 days. During that window you can still log in and export your data. After it, the workspace and its contents may be deleted permanently.