I led a one-month build of an in-house deletion API, removing six-figure annual licensing costs.
Regulatory deletion reaches into every store that holds customer data. The existing vendor workflow was expensive and put a core legal obligation outside our control, so I built the in-house replacement.
The requirements kept changing as new stores and retention rules arrived. I separated the business rules from the storage layer, which meant we could adapt the underlying systems without rewriting the core logic.
| Vendor cost | six figures annually |
| Deletion verification | across the data platform |
| Delivery | one month |
| Vendor dependency | removed from the request path |
What I'd do differentlyI would define, validate, and version the data contract on day one. The first version relied too much on one system's document shape, which made later changes harder to reason about.