AI Chat That Doesn't Save History: Temporary and Incognito Modes Compared

Three different meanings of "not saved"

When an AI product says a chat isn't saved, it means one of three things:

1. Stored, then deleted. The conversation is written to the provider's servers like any other, just excluded from your visible history and purged on a schedule (typically ~30 days). The promise is a deletion timeline, and timelines can be extended — by backups, by "safety review," or by a court.
2. Stored locally, not on servers. The chat exists only in your browser's storage. Genuinely private from the provider, but tied to one device and browser profile — clear your storage and it's gone; switch devices and it isn't there.
3. Never written down. The conversation exists only in the running page while it's open. Nothing to delete, expire, or subpoena, because no record is created.

Here is who does what, as of mid-2026.

ChatGPT Temporary Chat — stored, then deleted

Temporary Chats don't appear in your history, don't use or create memories, and aren't used for training. But OpenAI still stores them server-side and says they may be kept for up to about 30 days for safety purposes. The New York Times litigation demonstrated the catch with deletion timelines: a 2025 preservation order froze chats that would otherwise have been purged. Temporary Chat is a real privacy improvement over default ChatGPT — it's just category 1, not category 3.

Proton Lumo Ghost Mode — deleted on close, encrypted underneath

Lumo's Ghost Mode is an incognito toggle: a Ghost chat is deleted as soon as you close or click away from it, on top of Lumo's zero-access encryption for everything else. This is the strongest combination if you also want the provider mathematically unable to read your saved chats. The trade-off is the usual Lumo one: models that trail the frontier, inside Proton's ecosystem.

Duck.ai and Venice — local-first by design

Duck.ai stores recent chats on your device rather than its servers and anonymizes requests before they reach model providers. Venice keeps your whole chat history in local browser storage and doesn't retain prompts server-side after answering. Both are category 2: nothing to fetch from the provider, but your "history" is only as durable — and as private — as the browser it lives in. On a shared or work computer, local storage is the risk.

Evenfall incognito — never written down

Evenfall's incognito mode is category 3. Open an incognito chat and the conversation lives only in that tab: it is never written to Evenfall's database, never appears in your synced history, and closing or clearing the tab ends its existence. There's no 30-day purge to trust, because there's nothing to purge — your message is processed to generate the reply and isn't stored afterwards.

Two honest caveats. It requires a free account, because incognito messages count toward the daily message limit that keeps the free tier sustainable — but the content is never stored, and Evenfall doesn't train on conversations, run ads, or track you in any mode. And it's deliberately minimal: no web search, no attachments. For everyday use, regular Evenfall chats keep useful synced history with a hard-delete guarantee — incognito is for the questions you don't want filed even under your own name.

Which one should you use?

• You're already in ChatGPT and just want less retention: Temporary Chat — accept the ~30-day window.
• You want ephemerality plus zero-access encryption on saved chats: Lumo with Ghost Mode.
• You want no account at all: Duck.ai — anonymous and local, at the cost of continuity.
• You want maximum content freedom with local-only history: Venice.
• You want a no-record chat inside a polished daily-driver app — with synced, hard-deletable history when you do want it: Evenfall incognito.

Whichever you pick, read the product's own wording carefully: "doesn't appear in history" and "never stored" are very different promises.