Deleting your Vella account

Last updated: 6 November 2026

This page explains how to delete your Vella account, what deletion does, and how long it takes. It is published by Vella Labs Pty Ltd (ABN 20 701 816 202) and forms part of our Privacy Policy at vellaapp.com.au/privacy-policy.

1. Your right to delete

1.1 You can delete your Vella account yourself, at any time, from inside the App. You do not need to ask us, give a reason, or wait.

1.2 Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone.

2. How to delete your account in the App

Open Vella and sign in.
Go to Profile → Settings → Delete Account.
Read the confirmation and confirm. The confirmation says: Your profile, journals, photos, comments, messages, visits and reviews are deleted. A challenge or a place other people used stays for them, without your name. This cannot be undone.

Your account is deleted as soon as you confirm. You are signed out on every device.

3.1 Email support@vellaapp.com.au from the email address on the account and ask us to delete it.

3.2 We will send a confirmation code to that email address. When you reply with the code, we delete the account. This is how we make sure the request comes from you and not from someone else. We act within five business days of receiving the code.

4. What deletion does

4.1 In one sentence: Your profile, journals, photos, comments, messages, visits and reviews are deleted. A challenge or a place other people used stays for them, without your name. This cannot be undone.

4.2 In full, when you delete your account:

Your account is deleted, not switched off. Your email address, password, date of birth, display name, profile photo, biography and home location are deleted, and your username is released so that someone else can use it. Your sessions on every device are ended, and notifications stop.
What you posted is deleted. Your journal posts and every photo in them, your comments, your collections and what you saved in them, your badges, and who you follow and who follows you.
Your map activity is deleted. Your visit history, your ratings and reviews of places, the roads you marked, and the photos you added to places.
Your messages are deleted. A one-to-one conversation is deleted as a whole, so the other person loses their copy of it too. In a group chat, your messages are deleted and the group carries on for everyone else in it.
Two things stay, without you, because other people built on them. A challenge you created that other people joined stays for them, and shows its creator as "No User Found". A place you added to the map stays if other travellers have visited it, photographed it, saved it or posted about it. It keeps its name and location, and your description, photos, review, rating and visit are deleted from it. A challenge or a place that nobody else used is deleted with everything else.
Records of reports you made or that were made about you are kept, as described in section 10 of the Privacy Policy, so that we can review our own decisions and respond to a regulator. Your account is removed from them, but a report can still quote what was reported.

4.3 Apart from those records, we keep no copy of anything you made, de-identified or otherwise.

5. Timing and backups

5.1 Your account is deleted immediately on confirmation. The copies held by the services that run our chat, our map and our photo storage are deleted straight after, usually within minutes.

5.2 Copies of deleted information remain in our database backups for up to 30 days, after which the backups cycle through and nothing remains in them. Backups are used only to restore the service after a failure and are not used to reinstate a deleted account.

6. Questions