Deleting Contacts
Use this page when you need to remove people from Bento, reduce billable contact counts, or handle a customer deletion request.
In-app mass deletion is currently paused. You can still delete people one by one from profile pages, use the API for deletion requests, or ask Bento support to help with deletion at scale.
Short answer
Most teams should unsubscribe people instead of deleting them.
On Bento's newer billing plans, people who are unsubscribed and have no recent activity are removed from billable Active Users. That keeps your bill clean while preserving suppression history, so you do not accidentally email someone who opted out.
Delete contacts when you have a privacy, compliance, or data-retention reason to remove the profile. Do not use deletion as the default list-cleaning path.
What you can do today
You have three options:
- Delete individual contacts from their profile page in Bento.
- Queue deletions through the Data Deletion Requests API.
- Contact Bento support if you need a large group deleted.
If your goal is only to stop marketing sends or lower billing on a newer plan, unsubscribe those people instead. See Unsubscribes and Suppression for how Bento handles opt-outs.
When unsubscribe is better
Unsubscribing keeps the person on your suppression list. That matters because future imports, Shopify syncs, Stripe syncs, webhook replays, and other integrations can recreate a deleted profile.
If an unsubscribed profile gets deleted and later recreated by an integration, it may not carry the old unsubscribe state. That can create a compliance problem and hurt deliverability if the person receives marketing email again.
Use unsubscribe when:
- The person opted out of marketing.
- You are cleaning inactive or unengaged contacts.
- You want the person removed from billable Active Users on a newer Bento plan.
- You may import, sync, or backfill customer data later.
Do not delete unsubscribed people just to tidy your account. Suppression history is useful data. It protects your sending reputation and helps prevent accidental re-mailing.
Legacy billing plans
Some legacy plans bill for everyone in the account, including unsubscribed people. If you are on a legacy plan and want unsubscribed people removed from billing, contact support.
We can review the account and apply a special billing adjustment where appropriate, so unsubscribed people are excluded without forcing you to delete useful suppression history.
For current plan behavior, see Billing.
Deleting with the API
Use the Data Deletion Requests API when you need to queue deletion or anonymization programmatically.
The API is best for one-off customer requests, privacy workflows, or internal systems that need to submit deletion requests by email.
Before using the API:
- Pause any upstream sync that may recreate the person.
- Keep any audit record your business or legal team requires.
- Decide how your own systems will prevent the same address from being re-imported as active.
When to contact support
Contact Bento support if:
- You need to delete contacts at scale while in-app mass deletion is paused.
- You are on a legacy billing plan and need unsubscribed people removed from billing.
- You are not sure whether deletion or unsubscribe is the safer option.
- You have a compliance request with timing or audit requirements.
Include the site name, the approximate number of people affected, why you want them removed, and whether they are already unsubscribed.