Account Deletion

Account deletion is parent-only. If you are signed in as a child, ask a parent in your household to perform the deletion, or follow §3 below to request deletion by email.

From the mobile app:

1. Open Lightstead on your phone.
2. Sign in as a parent.
3. Tap the More tab (bottom-right).
4. Scroll to Settings → Data & Privacy.
5. Tap Full household export if you want a copy of your records first (recommended for homeschool families — many states require multi-year record retention).
6. Return to Settings → scroll to Danger zone.
7. Tap Delete household.
8. Type your household name to confirm.
9. The deletion is immediate.

From the web app:

1. Sign in at app.lightsteads.com as a parent.
2. Open Settings from the left navigation.
3. Open Data & Privacy → optional Full household export (recommended for homeschool families — many states require multi-year record retention).
4. Open Danger zone (separate item in the Settings nav) → Delete household.
5. Type your household name to confirm. Deletion is immediate.

Deleted immediately:

• All household members — parents and children.
• Calendar events, recurring rules, integrations with Google Calendar.
• Chore configurations, assignments, completion history, approval history, point ledger, reward catalog, redemptions.
• Lists, list items, grocery trips, meal plans, recipes, dinner table votes.
• Family wall notes and announcements.
• Journal entries (per-member).
• Homeschool: subjects, terms, attendance, assignments, grades, reading log, standardized tests, lesson logs, work-sample metadata, transcripts, filings, college packets, evaluator share tokens.
• Formation: consequences, incidents, restoration plans and steps.
• Economy: rewards, challenges, allowance rules, automated allowance history.
• Budget: accounts, transactions, envelopes, monthly assignments, recurring bills.
• Authentication credentials and active sessions.
• Push notification tokens (your devices will stop receiving notifications immediately).

Best-effort deleted within 7 days:

• Uploaded photos (work samples, recipe images, chore proofs, avatars).
• Generated PDFs (transcripts, NOI / affidavit filings, inspection packets).
• Other files in object storage (Cloudflare R2).

Retained briefly in encrypted backups:

• Daily encrypted database backups retained for up to 30 days for disaster recovery. After 30 days they expire automatically and are unrecoverable. We do not restore from backups for any reason other than a household-wide outage; we will not restore an individual household's data once deleted.

Retained per legal / financial obligation:

• Stripe transaction records — we keep your Stripe customer ID and invoice metadata as long as Stripe's policy and U.S. financial-records law require. Full card data was never stored by Lightstead; it was held by Stripe.
• Anonymized aggregate analytics (counts of households, deletion timestamps) that contain no personally identifying information.

If you cannot sign in to your Lightstead account — for example, the parent who created the account is no longer reachable, or you've forgotten which email address was used — request deletion by email:

Send a message to privacy@lightsteads.com with subject line Account deletion request and include:

• The email address you believe is on the account (best guess if unsure).
• The household or family name as it appears in the app, if you know it.
• Any other identifying detail that confirms ownership — date of account creation, a child's display name, last invoice date, etc.

We will verify your identity in good faith and complete the deletion within 7 business days at no cost. We may follow up for additional verification before deleting if the request is ambiguous; we do not delete accounts on a single unverified request, to protect against account takeover.

Children are added to a household by a parent and cannot delete their own records. When a child is removed from a household — either by a parent or via household deletion — we cascade-delete:

• The child's grades, attendance, assignments, work samples, reading log entries.
• The child's curriculum enrollments and lesson completions.
• The child's evaluator-share tokens and diploma records.
• The child's economy ledger entries and reward history.
• The child's journal entries.
• The child's authentication credentials, if the child had their own login.

Brief retention in encrypted backups (max 30 days, as described above) applies. If you need urgent removal of a child's data from backups — for example, in response to a custody order — email privacy@lightsteads.com and we will expedite as required by law.

Several U.S. states require homeschool families to retain records (attendance logs, grades, work samples, evaluations) for multiple years after instruction ends, even if the family relocates or stops using Lightstead. Examples include Pennsylvania (3 years), Maryland (variable by district), New York (annual filings on request), Hawaii (5 years post-graduation).

Deletion does not pause your retention obligation. The deletion flow in the app surfaces this reminder and offers a one-click Full household export before proceeding. The export bundles your homeschool records as PDFs and a portable ZIP archive of original files.

If you discover after deletion that you needed records you no longer have, contact privacy@lightsteads.com within 30 days — if encrypted backups have not yet expired, we may be able to assist with reconstruction for a documented compliance purpose at no cost.

Questions about deletion or this page: privacy@lightsteads.com.

For the full data practices that govern your account, see the Privacy Policy.