Fal (AI company)
| Basic information | |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2021 |
| Legal Structure | |
| Industry | Information Technology |
| Official website | https://fal.ai |
Fal describe themselves as "The world's best generative image, video, and audio models, all in one place. Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters." According to their X account https://x.com/FAL they were valued at $1.5 billion on a recent round of funding (1st August 2025).
Their reputation is generally positive regarding price and speed of their services.
Regarding anti-consumer behavior, it has recently been discovered that Fal keep all user generated content indefinitely, even after is has been deleted by the user.
Fal imply that at some point after 7 days, user data will be deleted (https://docs.fal.ai/model-apis/faq). They do not clearly state it will be though.
However a support thread in their Discord titled ""Delete IO" does not delete generated images" was created on 04/10/24 questioning why after they deleted an image created, the URL was still live some days later.
On 11/10/24 a Fal employee (meder in Discord) responded "Hey there 👋 , could you share the urls? We'll delete them manually.
Since the IO is deleted from our database, there is no other way of finding these images"
The significant concern here is both that after deleting the request for creating the file in their account, not only did the created file not get deleted, but Fal lose track of the fact that the file is associated with your account, leaving the file live online, with no way to delete it from or based on your account. If you don't manually record the URL of all your files, there is no way to ever find them again, and they remain live.
The thread continues to this date with several users indicating that deleted files as long as 8 months old have not been purged and the URLs are still live.
When asked about any way for a user to delete their own files without having to ask support, "mader" replied "For now there isn't. Files expire after 7 days." In this case he clearly states that files are meant to "expire" after 7 days, implying deletion at that time or soon after (though again not expressly saying so). That was on 15/10/2024.
The thread continues to this point with multiple users verifying the issue exists.
This issue can be verified either by checking the Discord channel https://discord.gg/fal-ai or by creating a Fal account, using the API to create and then delete any content and checking later to see the URL is still live.