Coming soon
Retract Delete your messages from both sides.
Removes your Instagram and Messenger messages — from your side and theirs. Reads and backs up Threads.
In development — nothing to download yet. It appears here the day it is ready.
The problem
Instagram offers you "delete conversation" — which removes it from your side only. The same conversation stays intact on the other person’s side, as if you had done nothing. Real deletion from both sides requires unsending every message individually.
This program was built for a conversation holding more than 80,000 messages across two years. By hand, that is not realistically possible. Retract does it one by one, at human speed, with a backup taken before it touches anything.
How it works
- 1
Choose
Connect your account and pick the conversations or messages you want gone. You can filter by date or by type.
- 2
Back up
Before any deletion, the program takes a full backup on your machine — text, images and dates. Backups are never deleted.
- 3
Delete
The program works at human speed with jittered intervals and a nightly quiet window. You can stop and resume at any point; progress is saved.
What sets it apart
Runs on your machine
Not one message reaches our servers. We cannot hand over what we do not hold.
A backup before any deletion
Everything is saved locally before it is removed. Backups are never wiped — not on sign-out, not on "clear local data".
Measured speed, not assumed
The safe ceiling was measured in practice: 558 messages per hour. Jittered intervals, a half-speed warm-up on day one, and a circuit breaker that stops on repeated errors.
Instagram, Messenger and Threads
Two services with fully separate browser profiles — signing in to one never touches the other, nor interrupts work running on it.
It never holds your data hostage
Licence expired? It drops to the free tier, and reading, backup and export keep working in full. This is guaranteed by the design of the program itself.
You can verify it yourself
Run any network monitor while the program works. You will see two connections only: a one-time licence activation, and the update check. Nothing else — and not one message leaves.
How we handle your data
It runs entirely on your machine
Retract runs on your machine, under your account, at your command. Your messages, conversations and the names of the people you talk to never reach our servers — there is no path that sends them, not merely a promise that we will not read them.
The backup is yours alone
Every backup is written to your machine under the program’s data folder, and the full path is shown to you in the interface. We never see it, cannot reach it, and do not know it happened.
What actually reaches us
An anonymous install key (a random identifier), a device hash, and the licence record. Nothing more — and none of them reveals your content or who you talk to.
Frequently asked
Can I restore a message after it is deleted?
Not from Instagram — deletion is permanent there. But the backup the program took beforehand stays on your machine, so you can still read what was deleted even though it will not return to the conversation.
Why is it slow?
Deliberately. High speed is the clearest automation signal, and it is what gets accounts restricted. 558 messages per hour is the ceiling we measured and found safe in practice.
Do you see my messages?
No. The program runs entirely on your machine. The only thing that reaches our server is licence verification — an anonymous install key and a device hash, nothing else. You can confirm this with a network monitor rather than taking our word for it.
What happens when the licence expires?
It drops to the free tier. Reading, backup and export keep working in full — only the daily quota narrows.
Does it need internet?
For deletion, yes, since it talks to Instagram. The licence, though, verifies locally — one moment of internet at activation, and never again after that.
Does it bundle a browser?
No. It uses the Google Chrome already installed on your machine, under a completely separate profile — your tabs and passwords are never touched. Chrome specifically, because ordinary Chrome carries the fingerprints and codecs Meta sees from millions of normal sessions every day; a browser bundled with a single tool differs in small, checkable ways, and it is the difference that gets noticed.