Someone fills out your form and joins the line. What happens to that row afterward, and who is allowed to remove it, is a fair question before you put your name and your customers' emails on it. Short version: nothing on our side deletes a sign-up. Only a setting you turn on yourself does, and you can pull everything out as a CSV any time, on any plan.
The row that gets created
When someone joins, their answers, email, status, and a one-time status link are saved as one entry tied to your waitlist. That entry starts as WAITING. You can mark it SERVED from the Entries tab, or the joiner can cancel their own spot from their status link. WAITING and SERVED both hold a spot on your list; only a cancel or a delete gives it back.
Nothing about that row disappears on its own. It sits in your dashboard until you export it, delete it by hand, or turn on the retention setting described below.
The retention setting
Every waitlist has an "Auto-delete entries after" setting on the Privacy tab of Settings. It is off by default: a new waitlist keeps every entry forever until you change it. Turn it on and you pick a window from 7 days up to 3 years. Below 7 days or above 3 years is not allowed.
Once it is on, a cron job checks every waitlist with a retention window roughly once an hour. Any entry older than the cutoff is deleted outright: the row, its answers, and its status link are gone, and there is no undo. It works through the backlog in batches so one huge list cannot hold up the run; if there is more to delete than one pass can handle, the next run picks up where it left off.
Cancelled and still-active entries are deleted the same way once they cross the cutoff. The only difference is what happens to your count: a WAITING or SERVED row frees its spot when it is deleted, because it was still holding one. A cancelled row already freed its spot when it was cancelled, so deleting it later does not change your capacity again. Deleting entries, cancelled or not, never adds signups back to your monthly usage. That number only counts joins as they happen.
Before you shorten the window, the settings page shows you the count first: how many entries are already older than the new cutoff and would be deleted, cancelled ones included, so you are not guessing. You confirm before it saves.
Gym classes
Mon to Fri, 6 PM to 5 PM the next day
4 questions
A class that runs every week is a good candidate for this. Six months of no-shows and old rosters do not need to sit in your dashboard forever, and a short window clears them out on a schedule instead of you doing it by hand.
What retention does not touch
A sign-up that is held, meaning it landed past your plan's included volume for the month, is never purged by retention, no matter how old it gets. Held rows are masked in your dashboard until your usage resets, your spend cap covers it, or you upgrade, at which point they unlock on their own. Retention only reaches entries that have already been shown to you.
Do you ever delete or hide my sign-ups?
No, not on our own: nothing removes a sign-up except the retention window you turn on yourself, and you can export everything before or after it runs. The one thing that looks like hiding is a held sign-up past your plan's included volume, and even that is not deleted. It is masked until your usage or an upgrade covers it, and then it appears with everything intact.
Exporting and deleting by hand
The Entries tab has an export that streams your whole list as CSV, in position order, any time you want it. It skips held rows so a file never carries an email address the dashboard is still masking, and it tells you how many were left out.
You can also delete a single entry by hand from the Entries tab. That does the same thing retention does to one row: the entry is gone, its spot reopens if it was still holding one, and there is no undo there either. A held entry cannot be deleted by hand, the same way it cannot be marked served or notified, until it is released.