---
title: "Delete a contact"
method: DELETE
path: "/api/v1/contacts/{contact_id}"
tags: ["contacts"]
---

# Delete a contact

`DELETE /api/v1/contacts/{contact_id}`

## Request

- Base URL: `https://api.app.tightly.io`
- URL: `https://api.app.tightly.io/api/v1/contacts/{contact_id}`
- Auth: HTTP bearer

Deletes one contact and answers 204 with no body. The contact's link to its supplier goes with it; the supplier does not.

Mail already held against this address is swept in the same call, because an inbox thread with no contact behind it is a thread nothing can route.

`contact_id` is a whole number, and an id no contact has is refused 404. There is no undo: use update_contact where the person has only changed role.

Scope: `suppliers:write`, which includes `suppliers:read`.

## Path parameters

- `contact_id` string, required

## Headers

- `Tightly-Version` string
- `Idempotency-Key` string

## Response `204`

The contact is gone. No body.

## Other responses

- `401`: No usable key: malformed, unknown, revoked, expired or stopped. One refusal covers all five, telling a caller which is which maps the surface for them. A request with no Authorization header at all is refused 400 before any key is looked for.
- `403`: The key may not reach this operation. `scope_missing` when the key does not hold Suppliers; `ip_not_allowed` when the caller's address is outside the key's allowlist. There is no `organization_mismatch` on this resource: no supplier or contact route names an organisation in its path, so there is nothing for a key to disagree with.
- `404`: No contact of this organisation has that id.
- `429`: The key has spent its allowance for this minute. 600 reads and 120 writes a minute, counted per key, refused calls included. `Retry-After` says how long to wait.
- `503`: The database is briefly out of reach, which is what a failover or a full connection pool looks like from outside. Wait the seconds `Retry-After` names and send the request again. A read is safe to repeat. A write is not, because the connection was lost in the middle of it, so read the object back before sending it a second time. Branch on the status rather than on `code`, which is `POSTGRES_UNAVAILABLE` from one of the two seams that raise this and `SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE` from the other.

---

[API](https://skmtc.dev/tightly/apis/tightly-api.md) · [All operations](https://skmtc.dev/tightly/apis/tightly-api/llms.txt) · [OpenAPI document](https://skmtc.dev/tightly/apis/tightly-api/revisions/199f7eb35afb?raw)