If you delete user output after 24 hours, is that a privacy feature or just a support problem?

People keep losing work, and I can't tell any more whether the thing I built to protect them is just annoying them.

Background: the thing I work on generates a file for you in the browser. For a long time I stored nothing at all — the input was discarded the second the output existed, and the output only lived in the tab you made it in. Two reasons. The storage bill for something people mostly make once and throw away looked bad at any real volume, and I liked being able to say plainly that nothing a user gave me sat on a server after they left.

What actually happened is that people would make something they were happy with, get distracted, close the tab, and lose it. No undo. Every email I got about it was some version of "can you get it back", and the answer was no — there had never been anything to get back.

So I've just moved to a short retention window: the output is held long enough to hand to you and then deleted automatically within 24 hours. It fixes the complaint. But it's left me with three things I didn't expect:

• I'm now storing user content, which is exactly what the original design existed to avoid. The promise got more complicated at the same moment it got more useful.

• "We delete it within 24 hours" is a claim I now have to actually keep, prove, and not quietly break the first time a debugging session would be easier with the file still around.

• It's not obvious this is even legible to users. Nobody has ever thanked me for not storing their data. They only notice storage when it's missing.

What I can't work out is whether the privacy position was ever worth anything commercially, or whether I was the only person in the room who cared about it. Everyone else in my category keeps everything forever behind an account, and as far as I can tell it costs them nothing.

So for anyone who's made this call: did short retention buy you anything you could actually measure — trust, conversion, a shorter security review — or was it a thing you believed in that users never noticed? And if you kept it strict, what did you do about the people who close the tab?