HereAfter AI is offline: what to do about your recordings

Prices below were checked on 17 August 2026 from HereAfter AI's own site. On that date the site returned a 404 error on every path we tried, so the figures are the last ones the company published rather than live ones.

We sell a product in this category, so read this page with that in mind. It is written for people who have recordings inside HereAfter AI and want them back. Most of what follows helps us not at all.

What has actually happened

There has been no shutdown announcement that we can find. What there is:

• The domain returns a 404 error on every path, checked 17 August 2026.
• The iOS app's last update is version 1.103, published 1 September 2023.
• The App Store listing carries 1.5 stars from 8 ratings, most describing an app that no longer signs in.

No notice, no export window, no email: that is the ordinary way these products end. StoryFile filed for Chapter 11 in the US Bankruptcy Court at White Plains, New York, case 7:24-bk-22398, on 5 May 2024, owing $150,000 in customer refunds. MyHeritage confirmed DeepStory’s discontinuation in an August 2025 notice; users reported it had stopped accepting new creations by July 2025. In 2021 OpenAI revoked Project December's GPT-3 access, ending one man's simulation of his late fiancée (The Register, 8 September 2021).

How to try to get your recordings back

Work through these in order. Steps 1 to 3 are the ones that most often work.

1. Do not delete or update the app. If HereAfter AI is still installed on any phone in the family, leave it exactly as it is. On iPhone, go to Settings, App Store, and turn off "Offload Unused Apps", which silently removes apps you have not opened. An installed app sometimes still holds cached audio or still reaches a server endpoint even when the marketing site has gone.
2. Open the app and screen-record anything that plays. If a stored answer still plays, capture it. On iPhone, add Screen Recording to Control Centre in Settings; it captures the audio the app produces. On Android, use the built-in screen recorder with internal audio enabled. The quality will be worse than the original, and it may be the only copy you get.
3. Search every family mailbox for "HereAfter". Sign-up confirmations, "your story is ready" notices, share links sent to relatives. Share links sometimes outlive the main site because they sit on a different subdomain or a storage bucket. Check devices for files already downloaded: the iOS Files app, Downloads, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox.
4. Ask the whole family, including the people who were not involved. The surviving clip is often a WhatsApp forward somebody saved and forgot about.
5. Find the legal entity before you send anything. Use the Internet Archive at web.archive.org to pull up the archived privacy policy and terms. Those pages name the company, its registered address and a privacy contact. Company registries and LinkedIn will tell you whether the entity was dissolved or acquired. An acquirer inherits both the recordings and the obligations: StoryFile's assets went to Key 7 Investment Company on 14 February 2025.
6. Send a formal data request to the address in that archived privacy policy. If the account holder is in the EU or the UK, cite the right of access under GDPR Article 15 and data portability under Article 20, and give them one month. In California, cite the CCPA right to know. These obligations survive a dead website; they end only when the legal entity does. Send it by email and, if you have an address, by post.
7. Do not pay anyone who promises to recover files from a shut-down cloud service. They cannot. The data is on someone else's servers or it is gone.

Be prepared for the honest outcome. If the app is uninstalled, nothing was downloaded, and the entity has dissolved, the recordings are most likely unrecoverable. It is worth spending an evening on steps 1 to 4 anyway.

Where HereAfter AI was better

HereAfter AI got there early, it was cheap, and its central design decision was more careful than most of what has replaced it. At $3.99 to $7.99 a month it was a fraction of anything comparable now sold, including ours. And it played back the person's actual recorded answer rather than generating a new one, which means it could never put words in someone's mouth. That constraint is the strongest ethical position available in this category, and a product that generates speech — ours included — has to work considerably harder to earn the same trust.

Where MemoriesBox is different

MemoriesBox records a long guided interview across many sessions rather than short prompt-and-answer turns, and after about 30 minutes of recording it builds a voice model, so the family can ask a question nobody thought to ask at the time. That is a real capability and a real risk, which is why every session is labelled as AI, the answers are drawn from what the person actually said, and consent is captured at recording time. Everything is exportable at any time, in open formats, and the recordings are hosted in the European Union.

HereAfter AI and MemoriesBox, side by side

What HereAfter AI cost

Those are last-published figures, not live ones. We can find no subscription currently on sale, and we have not been able to confirm whether existing billing was stopped.

Choose a playback service like HereAfter if

• You want answers played back exactly as they were spoken, with nothing generated. Storii records real voice by automated phone call at about $9.99 a month, and works on a landline.
• You want it to cost nothing. StoryCorps has recorded more than 700,000 people since 2003 and the archive sits at the Library of Congress.
• You want something physical and screen-free. The Prego and StoryCorps "Connection Keeper", launched 27 April 2026, is $20 with prompt cards and no app.
• You are uneasy about synthetic speech in principle. That is a reasonable position, and none of the three above involve any.

Choose MemoriesBox if

• You want the voice kept as a voice, and you want the family to be able to ask something new later.
• You want to know where the files physically are. Ours stay in the European Union.
• You want an export you can take away at any time, without an active subscription.
• The family speaks English, Russian, Ukrainian or Spanish.

Two other products do voice and question-answering: Avataari, which builds a clone with a voice vendor it does not name and does not disclose its hosting region, and Afterlife AI, operated from New South Wales. Both are worth looking at. Neither is hosted in the EU.

Why this will not happen to us, and what we can actually promise

We cannot promise a company will last. Anyone who does is guessing. What we can do is make the failure survivable: full export in open formats at any time, no subscription required to get your files out, and no export window that depends on us being alive to open it. Download the archive now and it stays readable whatever becomes of us. The uncomfortable version is at what happens if MemoriesBox shuts down.

We are small, at version 0.4.1, with no independent review record and no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification. Take an export in your first month, from any service in this category, including this one.

Questions people ask

What happened to HereAfter AI?

The site returns a 404 error on every path, checked 17 August 2026, and the iOS app has not been updated since version 1.103 on 1 September 2023. We have found no public shutdown announcement, no export window and no notice to customers.

Is HereAfter AI shutting down?

By any practical measure it already has. There is no working website, no update to the app in nearly three years, and App Store reviews describing failed sign-ins. Treat any recordings still on a phone as the only copy and capture them today.

How do I get my recordings out of HereAfter AI?

Do not delete the app, screen-record anything that still plays, search family mailboxes for share links, then send a GDPR Article 15 or CCPA request to the privacy contact in the archived privacy policy on web.archive.org. Full steps are above.

What is the best HereAfter AI alternative?

For playback of real recorded voice with no synthesis, Storii at about $9.99 a month, or StoryCorps for free. For voice plus the ability to ask a new question, Avataari and Afterlife AI do it outside the EU and MemoriesBox does it inside, at $139 a year.

If you want to keep the voice itself

If you lost recordings this way, the useful next step is not a new subscription. It is recording something this month, anywhere, even on a phone. If you would rather it were kept properly, with an export you control from day one, this is what we built.

See what MemoriesBox costs

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