Delete your account

How to have your BikeOtter account and everything attached to it erased from our servers. BikeOtter is operated by OpenBikeControl UG (haftungsbeschränkt). This page lists the steps, the exact data that goes with the account, and — honestly, including the parts we do not control — what is kept afterwards and for how long.

Version 1.4 · last updated 7 October 2026 · applies to the app and to this site

The short version

Send one e-mail. Write to support@bikeotter.app from the address you sign in with, subject “Delete my account”. That address is the account, so sending from it is how you prove it is yours. Full steps below.
Most of BikeOtter never needed an account. Routes, route push, ride download, alerts and rules all work signed out. If you never used live tracking, ride e-mails, Strava, route sync or the Plus settings backup, there is probably nothing on our side to delete — check first.
Deletion is total, not a flag. The account row is removed and every table that references it cascades: sessions, position points, group rides, watcher messages, your saved contacts, the Strava link, your settings backup and your synced routes. The full list.
Your rides are on your phone, not on our servers, and so are your routes unless you synced them. Deleting the account cannot remove what is on the phone, and does not need to. Uninstalling the app does. Why.
It is done in days, and no later than one month — Art. 12(3) GDPR. Afterwards, only provider-side traces remain (backups, request logs), and §5 says exactly which.

1. Do you have an account at all?

Worth checking, because in BikeOtter an account is the exception rather than the rule. Planning and editing routes, pushing them to a bike computer or an Edge, pulling rides back off the bike computer, alerts, rules, weather and voice control all work signed out. Nothing about them reaches an account.

An account exists for exactly five features:

Live tracking — publishing a watch link while you ride;
Ride-notification e-mails — mailing that link to contacts you saved;
The Strava link — importing routes and activities, uploading rides;
Settings backup (Plus, off unless you switched it on) — a copy of your settings you can restore on another phone;
Route sync (off unless you switched it on in the app or saved a route in the route planner on this website): a copy of your routes, shared between the app and the website.

If you never used any of those, there is no account and nothing on our servers to erase. There is no password to worry about either: signing in is a magic link sent to your e-mail address, or sign in with Strava. We never held a password of yours.

Signing out is not deletion. Signing out ends the session on that phone and leaves the account intact. Deleting the app removes everything the app kept on the phone, but leaves the account intact too. Only the request below removes the account.

2. How to ask — the steps

There is no self-service button in the app yet. Deletion is by e-mail, and it is deliberately short:

Open your mail app and start a message to support@bikeotter.app.
Send it from the e-mail address you sign in to BikeOtter with. That address is what identifies the account, so sending from it is the identity check — there is no form to fill in and no document to attach. (Signed in with Strava? See the note below.)
Put Delete my account in the subject line. You do not have to give a reason, and we will not ask for one.
Reply once to our confirmation e-mail. We answer with a short message naming the account we are about to delete; one reply confirming it, and it goes. This exists so that a spoofed or forwarded request cannot delete someone else's account.

If you signed in with Strava

A Strava-first account has no real e-mail address: Strava does not hand over the athlete's address, so BikeOtter creates the account under an internal placeholder of the form strava-<athlete id>@no-reply.bikeotter.app, which nobody can send or receive mail from. Step 2 therefore cannot apply to you as written.

Instead, write from the address on your Strava account and include your Strava athlete ID or a link to your Strava profile. We match it against the athlete ID stored with your connection, and confirm as in step 4.

Before you write, please also disconnect Strava in the app — that is the one action that actively revokes BikeOtter's authorisation at Strava. Deleting the account removes our copy of your tokens but does not tell Strava anything; see §6.

3. What happens after you ask

We confirm. You get a reply naming the account, so nothing is deleted on the strength of one unverified message.
We delete. The account record is removed, and the database removes everything that references it in the same operation — see §4. It is a deletion, not a “deactivated” flag: there is no restore, no grace period and no way for us to undo it afterwards.
We tell you it is done.

How long: usually within a few days of your confirmation. The binding limit is Art. 12(3) GDPR — one month from the request, extendable only in genuinely complex cases, and we will say so if that ever happens rather than going quiet.

If you would rather have a copy of your data before it goes (Art. 15 / Art. 20 GDPR), say so in the same e-mail and we will send it first.

4. What is deleted

Everything below is stored against your user id and is removed with the account. This is not a promise about a cleanup script: every one of these tables declares your account as a foreign key with cascade delete, so removing the account row removes them in the same transaction. The two exceptions, the website's free-goes counter and the cached Plus check, carry your account id without such a key; a database trigger on the account row deletes them, in that same transaction. Described in rider terms, with the technical name in brackets where it helps:

What it is	What is in it
The account itself	Your e-mail address and sign-in timestamps, and — if you signed in with Strava — the Strava athlete ID and display name. There is no password, no profile, no photo.
Your live-tracking rides (sessions)	The rider name shown to watchers, the route's name, the planned route line, its distance, the coordinates it started at, your two sharing switches, the share token behind the /r/… link, and the ride's timestamps.
Every position you shared (live points)	Latitude and longitude, altitude, elapsed time, gradient and ride state for each point — plus speed, distance, climb so far, ETA and ascent remaining if “share speed” was on, heart rate, power and cadence if you switched “share heart rate & power” on, and a battery-low flag on any point sent while your phone's battery was low and not charging.
Group rides you created (live groups)	The group's name, its /g/… token, status and timestamps.
Group rides you joined (live group members)	The rider name shown on that ride's roster, and when you joined. One row per ride you said yes to — including the ones you created.
Your race lap times (race results)	For each race you rode: its name, your rider name and your lap times. Otherwise kept 90 days on their own clock; deleting the account removes them at once.
Race invites you sent (race invites)	Which of your contacts you invited to which race, as racer or spectator, and when.
Messages watchers sent you	The message text, who sent it and when. They hang off the ride, so they go with it.
The e-mail addresses you saved for ride notifications (contacts)	Each address, the name you gave it, its unsubscribe and message tokens, and whether it unsubscribed or hard-bounced.
The groups you sorted those contacts into	Group names, which is your default, and which contact belongs to which group.
The record of who was mailed about which ride	One row per contact per ride, with its delivery status — the bookkeeping that stops anyone being mailed twice for the same ride.
The Strava link	Your Strava access and refresh tokens, athlete ID and name, the granted scopes and when you connected.
Strava leftovers tied to you	The cached copies of your Strava routes and activities, your personal read counter, and any half-finished authorisation attempt.
Your settings backup (settings backups)	Only if you switched Settings backup on: the one copy of your settings — units, riding speed, body weight, bikes and tyre setup, skin type, alert rules, the notification-forwarding app list, zone thresholds and your other app preferences — plus the phone model and app version it came from and when you consented and last backed up. See §3.1 of the privacy policy.
Your synced routes (cloud routes)	Only if you used route sync or saved a route on the website: one entry per route with its name, distance, climb, number of stops, start point and map area, whether you starred it, its turn-cue setting, where it came from, a fingerprint of its content, its revision and timestamps, and whether it is waiting to be sent to your bike computer. The markers left by routes you deleted go too. See §3.2 of the privacy policy.
The routes themselves (cloud route bodies)	Each synced route as the app stores it: the line and its elevation, turn cues, stops, surface, planned stops, intervals and heart-rate plan.
When you last synced (route sync state)	One timestamp per account: the clock behind deleting the routes of an account that has not synced for 24 months.
Your free goes on the website (plus taste)	How many free POI searches your account has used in the route planner on this website, and when that last changed. Deleted by the trigger described above.
The cached Plus check (RevenueCat check cache)	Whether RevenueCat last said your account has Plus, and when we asked. Deleted by the trigger described above.
Your support conversation (support thread)	The thread itself and every message in it — yours and ours — plus the per-message device/app facts attached to your own messages. This row does cascade: it goes with your account, the same as everything else in this table.
A diagnostic log attached to a support message	This one does not cascade with the account. The uploaded copy lives in its own private storage, separate from the row you are deleting, and is removed on its own 180-day clock regardless of whether you still have an account — see §9 of the privacy policy.

That is the complete inventory of what our database holds about a rider. There is no analytics profile, no crash-report history, no advertising identifier and no event log about you anywhere in the product, because none of those exist in BikeOtter at all — see the privacy policy.

What is not deleted, because it is not about you

Three caches on our side are keyed by place, never by rider, and hold no user id that a deletion could match: the weather cache, the POI cache and the geocoding cache. A weather answer for a set of coordinates is the same answer for everyone who asks; nothing in those rows says who asked. They expire on their own — weather after 2 hours, geocoding after 8 days. The POI cache is empty in practice: POI search is now answered from our own copy of OpenStreetMap data and no longer caches its answers, and anything left in it would be gone after 24 hours.

The free-goes counter of the app is not about your account either. The app keeps it against a random identifier it creates on your phone, not against your account id, so a deletion has nothing to match it with. It holds only how many free goes of a Plus feature that installation has used, and when that last changed.

The same is true of our Strava rate-limit counters at application level, which are keyed by time window and copied from Strava's own response headers. They count requests, not riders, and contain no user id. (The per-rider read counter is a separate table and is deleted — it is in the list above.)

5. What is kept, and for how long

The parts below outlive the deletion. Some are ours; most are not, and where we could not establish a provider's retention window we say so rather than invent a number.

What	Kept for	Why
Database backups at Supabase	We cannot state a figure. Backup and point-in-time-recovery retention is set by our backend provider, not by anything in our code, so we will not put a number here we cannot stand behind. Ask and we will get Supabase's own answer in writing.	A row deleted today can still exist inside a backup snapshot taken yesterday, until that snapshot ages out. This is true of every hosted database, including ones whose policies do not mention it.
Request logs at Cloudflare	Cloudflare's own retention limit for Workers Logs, which is a small number of days and is set by Cloudflare, not by us — we could not pin the exact figure from our configuration, only that logging is switched on and persisted.	The Worker that sends ride-notification e-mails keeps error and invocation logs so that a failed send is diagnosable. Those lines carry internal record IDs and delivery errors — not your rides, not your positions.
Mail delivery logs	Also Cloudflare's window, above.	Sending mail necessarily leaves a trace of the attempt at the sending infrastructure.
Your request e-mail, in our support mailbox	Deleted once the request is closed and confirmed.	We have to read it to act on it. We keep no separate list of who asked.
Position points and rides, if you never ask us anything	7 days	Worth knowing: even with no deletion request, a shared ride's record and every position point in it are deleted together 7 days after the ride ends or expires — group rides likewise. A minutely job enforces it. Deleting the account simply removes them sooner.
Synced routes, if you never ask us anything	Until you delete them, or 24 months after your last sync	An account that has not synced for 24 months has all of its cloud routes deleted by a daily job, without anyone asking. A route you deleted leaves a marker without its content for 180 days, so that your other devices delete it too.

Nothing in that list is retained for our benefit — there is no “deleted users” archive, no shadow copy and no retained analytics record, because there is no analytics. What is left is what any hosted service unavoidably leaves behind: a backup taken before you asked, and a server's own log of having handled a request.

6. What a deletion cannot reach

A server-side deletion removes what is on our servers, and riders reasonably assume that means everything. It does not, and the difference is worth stating plainly.

Everything on your phone stays on your phone — except a log you send us. Your route library, the rides you pulled off the bike computer or recorded, their GPX and FIT files, and your settings, rules and saved locations live in the app's own storage on the device and are never uploaded to us (the exceptions, a settings backup and route sync you switched on, are deleted with the account, see §4); deleting the account cannot remove the copies on the phone, because we cannot reach them. Uninstalling the app removes them. A phone backup you made may still contain a copy.
The diagnostic log is different: it is on by default, and it does leave the phone once you use it. It stays on the device, rotating automatically, until you attach it to a support request — that message is sent from inside the app itself, as part of an ongoing support conversation, not by e-mail. Attaching the log uploads it; see §4 for what happens to that uploaded copy, and §9 of the privacy policy for the mechanism in full. You can clear the on-phone copy, or turn logging off, from Settings → Diagnostics at any time.
Anything you exported or shared. A route you shared as a link carries the route inside the link itself rather than on a server, so an old link keeps working for whoever holds it. Files you exported are wherever you sent them.
E-mails already delivered. Ride-notification e-mails that have gone out are in your recipients' inboxes. We cannot recall them, and they show the address you signed in with, because their Reply-To is set to it so people can answer you.
Your data at Strava. Rides BikeOtter uploaded to Strava belong to your Strava account and are governed by Strava's policy, not ours; deleting your BikeOtter account does not touch them. Nor does it revoke BikeOtter's authorisation at Strava — the account deletion drops our copy of your tokens, but only the Disconnect button in the app actively tells Strava to revoke them. Disconnect first, or remove BikeOtter yourself under Settings → My Apps on Strava.
Your relationship with the app store. Apple's and Google's own account, purchase and diagnostic records exist between you and them, and we can neither see nor delete them.
Your purchase records at RevenueCat. RevenueCat handles Plus purchases for us and keeps its own record of them, under your account id once you have signed in in the app. Deleting your account here does not reach it on its own; if you want that record gone too, say so in the same e-mail and we will delete it at RevenueCat.
Rides on the bike computer. Files stored on your bike computer are on that device. Delete them there.

7. Deleting less than everything

Deleting the account is the largest hammer available, and it is often not the one you want. Each of these you can do yourself, in the app, right now:

Stop sharing your position — end the live share. Upload stops immediately; the sweeps in §5 then clear what was stored.
Remove a contact — delete it from your contacts, and its saved address goes with it. A recipient who would rather not hear from you at all can use the unsubscribe link in any notification e-mail; that needs no account and stops all further mail to that address.
Cut the Strava link — Disconnect revokes the authorisation at Strava and removes the stored connection.
Stop sharing heart rate, power or speed — the two sharing switches take effect for the next ride; nothing further is uploaded.
Clear the diagnostic log — from settings, at any time.
Delete your settings backup — switch Settings backup off, and the copy on our servers is deleted immediately. This works even after Plus has ended.
Take a route out of the cloud: choose Keep only on this phone on a synced route in the app, and its copy on our servers is deleted while the route stays on your phone. Deleting a route in the route planner on the website deletes it everywhere, your phone included. Either way a marker without the route's content stays for 180 days, so that your other devices follow. Switching route sync off only stops syncing; it does not delete what is already in the cloud. All of this works without Plus.

None of these needs to involve us, and none of them requires deleting the account.

8. Contact

Deletion requests, questions about this page, or any other data-protection request (access, correction, portability, objection — Art. 15 to 21 GDPR): support@bikeotter.app. Messages are read by a person, not a ticket robot.

The controller is OpenBikeControl UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Ludwigsburg, Germany — full postal details on the imprint page, and the processing this deletion undoes is described in the privacy policy.

If you think we have handled a request badly, you may complain to a data protection supervisory authority — in the EU, the one where you live, where you work, or where the alleged infringement took place (Art. 77 GDPR).