What Happened to HereAfter AI? A Timeline, and What to Do Now

HereAfter AI was, for a few years, the best-known app of its kind: you answered interview questions in your own voice, and later your children or grandchildren could ask "how did you meet Mom?" and hear you answer. In July 2026 a short closing notice replaced its homepage. By September the website was gone altogether. This page collects what we could verify ourselves, what has only been reported, and what a former user should do now. We build a product in the same category, and we say so where it matters.

Last checked: 11 September 2026.

What HereAfter AI was

The company grew out of a personal project. In 2016 the journalist James Vlahos built a chatbot from hours of recorded conversations with his dying father, the "Dadbot" that Wired and, later, CBC Radio covered. HereAfter AI turned that into a consumer app: a guided interview you recorded over weeks, stored as real audio, which family members could later query by voice. No generated impersonation, the answers were the actual recordings, played back. That record-first model is still, in our view, the most honest thing anyone in this category has shipped.

The timeline, as far as it can be verified

• 23 January 2023: version 1.0 of the HereAfter AI app in its current form is published on the App Store by HereAfter Inc. (copyright line: 2022). The product itself is older; its story starts with the Dadbot.
• 1 September 2023: version 1.103, the last update the iOS listing shows. Nothing shipped after that.
• Early 2024: the founder announces a full-time role at another company. The app keeps running, unchanged.
• July 2026: a closing notice appears on hereafter.ai, thanking families and pointing account holders to support@hereafter.ai. No deadline, no refund policy, no explanation is published alongside it.
• August–September 2026: the website stops resolving. On 11 September the homepage returns a "not found" error and the Google Play listing is gone; the iOS listing is still visible but stale.

What we could not verify: the exact wording of the notice (the page it sat on no longer exists), whether the support inbox is still answered, and whether any deadline was communicated to users directly by email. If you received such an email, it overrides anything written here.

Why a loved, well-reviewed app closes

We do not have inside information, and we will not pretend to. The public signals are ordinary ones: a small team, an app that stopped receiving updates three years before the notice, a founder who moved on. HereAfter was written about in every major outlet. It closed anyway. The lesson for families is not about this company; it is about the category. Any service that holds the only copy of your father's voice can disappear, and the time to insist on a full export is before you need it.

What a former user should do this week

1. Get the recordings back. Email support@hereafter.ai from the address on your account and ask for everything, audio, photos, transcripts, the list of questions with dates. We wrote a step-by-step guide, including what to check on your own phone first and how to word the request: How to get your HereAfter AI recordings back.
2. Stop paying, and ask about a refund. If a subscription is still renewing through Apple or Google, cancel it in the store, not in the app. What the plans cost, what a "lifetime" purchase meant, and how store refunds work in practice, in HereAfter AI pricing: what it cost, and what happened to lifetime plans.
3. Decide where the recordings live next. First in two places you control, a drive and a cloud folder. Then, if you want them to become something a family can keep using, a platform that lets you export again. We compared the options fairly, ours included, in HereAfter AI alternatives.

Where MemoAgent fits, plainly

We build one of the alternatives. MemoAgent starts from what a family already has, photos with their stories, voice notes, WhatsApp exports, and yes, HereAfter recordings if you recover them, and builds two things from it: a persona you can talk with, in the person's style and, if there is enough audio, their reconstructed voice; and a living album beside it. Export is not tied to a tier: photos with one click, everything else on request, as the files you uploaded, it is written down on our privacy page, which is the one promise this whole page is about. How it works, what it costs, and a live example.

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