How to delete your Insomnia account

About deleting your Insomnia account

Insomnia is a widely used, cross-platform API client that facilitates the development, testing, and debugging of REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs. By centralizing request collections, environment variables, and authentication tokens, it serves as a critical productivity tool for software engineers and quality assurance professionals. While it offers cloud-syncing capabilities through Insomnia Cloud, many users eventually decide to delete their accounts to minimize their digital footprint or migrate to self-hosted alternatives.

Users typically seek to delete their Insomnia accounts for several service-specific reasons:

• Transitioning away from cloud-synced collections toward local-only or alternative API testing platforms.
• Simplifying security audits by purging sensitive environment variables or saved authorization tokens from remote servers.
• Ensuring that project-related metadata or collaborative workspace data is scrubbed from the Insomnia infrastructure.

What happens to your data

When you initiate the deletion process for your Insomnia account, the service attempts to purge your associated cloud profile. This specifically targets data stored in the Insomnia Cloud, which may include:

• Saved API request collections and folders.
• Environment variables and secret keys stored within your cloud workspaces.
• Collaboration history and shared request data.
• Profile information including your email address and authentication history.

However, note that data stored locally on your machine—such as your local files, plugins, or downloaded themes—will remain on your computer unless manually deleted. Furthermore, logs that are anonymized for service diagnostics may be retained for a limited period per their legal obligations.

Privacy considerations

Using a cloud-integrated tool like Insomnia implies a level of trust in how your API requests and variable sets are handled. While Insomnia is a powerful developer tool, it is important to be mindful of your data hygiene:

• Always rotate any API keys or secrets that you have previously uploaded to Insomnia Cloud before deleting your account.
• Review the workspace permissions if you are part of a team, as deleting your account may orphan shared resources.
• Disable cloud syncing in settings if you wish to maintain a strictly offline workflow for sensitive development environments.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does deleting my account delete my local request collections?

No, deleting your account primarily targets the cloud-synced data. Your local files remain on your local disk until you manually delete the directories where Insomnia stores its data.

Can I recover my Insomnia account after deletion?

Account deletion is generally permanent. Once the account is purged from the Insomnia database, your cloud-synced collections cannot be recovered.

Will deleting my account remove my API keys stored in environment variables?

While the account deletion clears the cloud storage of those variables, it is best practice to treat any secret keys saved in an online service as compromised and rotate them immediately.

Does Insomnia retain my request history for analytics?

Insomnia may collect anonymized telemetry data to improve software performance. Even after account deletion, aggregate performance data may persist, though it is usually dissociated from your personal identity.

Is there a way to export my data before deleting the account?

Yes, Insomnia provides an export feature in the settings. Always export your collections as JSON or HAR files before deleting your account to ensure you do not lose important work.