You Deleted Your App — What Happens Next, and What You Can Do
Deleting an app doesn't erase it immediately — it's marked for deletion and kept for a retention window of about a week before being purged for good. The catch is that you can't restore it yourself: recovery is an administrator action, so it means contacting support, and it only works while the app is still within that window. If you've just deleted something by accident, the useful response is to ask quickly rather than to keep experimenting. And there's one guard rail worth knowing in advance: you can't delete a running app at all, so an accidental delete always takes at least two deliberate steps.
You have to stop it first
Deletion is blocked while an app is running. You'll get an error rather than a confirmation, and you have to stop the app before the option does anything.
That's a small thing that prevents a large class of accidents — it means nobody deletes a live service with one misplaced click. It also means that if you're staring at a delete you didn't intend, you took at least two actions to get there, which is worth remembering when reconstructing what happened.
What "deleted" actually means
The app is marked for deletion rather than removed. Concretely:
- It disappears from your normal view and stops counting as an active app.
- The record, and what belongs to it, is retained for a period — roughly a week by default.
- A background sweep purges anything past that window, permanently.
- The deletion is recorded in the app's event history as
marked_for_delete, and a recovery would be recorded too.
So there is a grace period. It's a real one, and it's the only reason accidental deletes are sometimes fixable.
But you can't undo it yourself
This is the part worth being direct about: recovery is an administrator operation. There's no "restore" button in the panel for your own apps, so the route is a support request.
Which means the variable that matters most is time. The retention window is measured in days, and a request that arrives inside it can be acted on; one that arrives after the purge cannot, because there's nothing left to restore. If you've deleted something you need:
- Don't recreate it under the same name yet — you'll only confuse the situation.
- Contact support straight away, with the app's name and roughly when you deleted it.
- Say it was accidental and that you'd like it recovered. Recovery is possible within the window; it isn't a guarantee, and treating it as one is how people end up disappointed.
Being honest about that: this is a best-effort safety net, not a feature you should plan around.
What actually protects you
The grace period is nice. Your own copies are what make deletion a non-event:
- Code in a repository. If your app was deployed by git push or built from a repo, the code isn't in the platform in the first place, and recreating the app is a push away. Zip-deployed projects are the ones to watch — keep the source somewhere real.
- Data you've downloaded. Nothing backs up your volumes, and a deleted app takes its volumes with it. A dump you took last week is the difference between an inconvenience and a loss. You can pull one straight from the panel's file browser — while the app still exists.
- Configuration written down. Env var names, port bindings and protocols, volume paths, the run command. These are quick to recreate and annoying to reconstruct from memory. A README in your repo covers it.
With those three, deleting an app costs you the time to redeploy. Without them, it costs you the project.
Stopping is usually what you wanted
A lot of deletions are really "I want this to stop using my resources."
Stopping does that. It frees CPU and RAM allocation for other apps, keeps volumes, env vars, ports, and settings intact, and is instantly reversible. It doesn't free disk — volumes belong to the app — but for freeing compute or parking something you're not using, it's strictly better than deleting.
Reach for delete when you actually want the thing gone, including its data. Reach for stop for everything else.
FAQ
Can I recover an app I deleted?
Possibly, if you ask quickly. Deletion is a soft delete with a retention window of about a week, but restoring is an administrator action — contact support rather than expecting a button in the panel.
How long do I have?
Days, not weeks — roughly a week by default, after which a background sweep purges the app permanently. The sooner you ask, the better.
Why can't I delete my app?
It's running. Stop it first — deletion is blocked for running applications.
Does deleting an app delete its volumes?
Yes. The data goes with it, which is why a downloaded backup matters more than the grace period.
I just wanted to free up resources — should I delete?
Probably not. Stopping frees CPU and RAM and is instantly reversible. Note that neither stopping nor deleting is the fast route to freeing disk if the app is still around.
How do I make this a non-issue?
Keep code in a repository, download a data backup periodically, and note your configuration. Then recreating a deleted app is a deploy rather than a recovery.
Wrapping up
The soft-delete window is a decent safety net and a bad plan. It exists so that a genuine mistake caught quickly can be undone by someone with the access to do it — not so you can treat the platform as your only copy. Keep the code in git, keep a recent dump on your own machine, and deletion stops being a category of disaster and becomes an afternoon of redeploying.