What happens to your recordings if MemoriesBox shuts down
MemoriesBox recordings and transcripts can be exported at any time and kept on your own drive. If the company closed, exported files would still play. The avatar is a service, and services stop when the company behind them does.
Facts on this page verified
The short answer
We cannot promise MemoriesBox will exist in thirty years. No company in this category can, and the ones that implied otherwise are the reason this page had to be written. What we can do is make sure the recordings do not depend on us being here. They are held in the European Union, they can be exported at any time, and once exported they play on an ordinary computer with no account and no company involved.
The rest of this page is the evidence, what we have actually done, and the parts we still cannot guarantee.
A recording is an object. An avatar is a service.
A recording is a file. It sits on a disk, it opens in any ordinary audio player, and it needs no company to exist. An avatar is a service: a model, servers, bandwidth, and somebody paying for all three every month. Files outlive companies. Services do not.
Every honest answer to "what if you shut down" follows from that difference. A company that says the conversation will always be there is describing a hope. A company that says the audio will always be there because you hold your own copy is describing a plan.
This keeps happening
None of this is ancient history, and none of it is disputed.
| Service | What happened | When | What people were left with |
|---|---|---|---|
| StoryFile | Chapter 11 bankruptcy, US Bankruptcy Court, White Plains, New York, case 7:24-bk-22398 | Filed 5 May 2024 | Roughly $1.5M in assets against $10.5M in liabilities, including $150,000 owed in customer refunds. The business was sold out of bankruptcy to Key 7 Investment Company on 14 February 2025. |
| Project December | OpenAI revoked the service's model access, ending Joshua Barbeau's simulation of his late fiancée (The Register, 8 September 2021) | 2021 | The simulation stopped. The decision was made by a supplier, not by the user or the service. |
| HereAfter AI | Every path on the site returns 404; the iOS app was last updated v1.103 on 1 September 2023 and holds 1.5 stars from 8 ratings | Checked 17 August 2026 | No published wind-down, no announcement, no export window that we can find. |
| MyHeritage DeepStory | Discontinued by a large, profitable company; users redirected to LiveMemory | August 2025 | Being profitable is not the same as being permanent. A feature can be retired while the company thrives. |
| Replika | Features removed in a product update; users described the change as a second bereavement | February 2023 | The product began as a memorial bot built from the messages of Roman Mazurenko. What changed was a policy, not a technical failure. |
Read the middle two rows together. StoryFile ran out of money. MyHeritage did not. The archive stopped either way.
We are not writing this to score a point. Most of these were built by people trying to do something decent, and the sector is small enough that the failures are not anonymous. The pattern matters more than the names. In five years, the thing that most often ended a digital memorial was not a hack or a leak. It was a business decision, a supplier decision, or an empty bank account.
What we have done about it
| Commitment | Status today | Where you can check |
|---|---|---|
| Recordings, transcripts and photographs stored in the European Union | True: Stockholm and Supabase's EU region, application in Frankfurt. The voice model is the one thing held outside the EU, at the vendor | /trust/where-your-data-lives |
| Export of your material at any time, subscription or not | True: the export checks that you are signed in and nothing else, and builds the ZIP in your browser | /trust/export |
| The voice is built only from recordings the person made themselves, knowingly, while alive | True: it is built only when the person presses "Create my digital self" in their own settings, from their own answers | /trust/consent |
| Every conversation says it is AI | True: a line under the conversation heading, every session, in all five languages; generated audio is stored with AI-generated metadata | /trust/eu-ai-act-article-50 |
| No streaks, no push notifications, no daily counts | True. One email exists — a single question to someone who recorded and then stopped, never more than once in seven days, opt-out without login — and it is described on the companion page rather than hidden | /features/companion |
| A way to stop | True: Settings → Voice → "Retire my digital self" deletes the voice model at the vendor and the character brief. Deleting the account deletes everything | /trust/consent |
The most useful item on that list is the dullest one. Export early, export more than once, and keep a copy somewhere we do not control. A copy on your own drive is the only part of this arrangement that no bankruptcy court, supplier or product manager can reach.
What happens if you stop paying
A lapsed payment is far more common than a bankruptcy, and it is the scenario most services handle badly. Ours is written into the Terms, and it has no retention period in it because nothing is deleted.
| If | Then |
|---|---|
| Your card expires, you cancel, or nobody renews after you are gone | Everything already recorded stays exactly where it is, for as long as the service exists. You and any released heirs can still read it, listen to it and download all of it |
| You want to add to it again | Restart the subscription. That is the only thing a subscription pays for: adding, not keeping |
| A family member or executor wants to add to the archive later | They can, by taking over the subscription on the account. Nothing has to be reopened, because nothing was closed |
| The letters go unanswered | We write when the subscription ends, again after a month, and once a year after that. If nobody answers we do nothing: an unread inbox is not permission to erase a life |
| Anything gets deleted | Only because you asked, in Settings → Privacy, or because a legal representative asked us in writing |
What a wind-down would actually look like
This is the part where most pages in this category become vague, so here is the procedure, with the numbers in it.
- Ninety days' notice, minimum. If MemoriesBox is going to stop, every account holder and every heir who holds a key gets an email on the first day of the notice period, and again at thirty days and at seven.
- Export stays open for the whole period, for everyone, whether or not a subscription is running. The first email carries a direct link to the download in Settings → Privacy, which builds the whole archive in your browser.
- The voice models are deleted at the vendor on the last day. They are not transferable and we will not leave them behind us. What survives is what was exported.
- Recordings are not an asset for sale. We commit not to sell, license or transfer customer recordings, transcripts or voice models in an insolvency or a sale of the company, other than to a successor who takes on these same Terms and this same page. GDPR Article 5(1)(b) makes that binding on an administrator regardless of what we would prefer.
- The entity is German. MemoriesBox is at Lychener Str. 1, 10437 Berlin. If it were ever administered, that would happen under German insolvency law, in a Berlin court, with the Berlin data protection authority holding jurisdiction over the data.
- There is no escrow and no custodian today. We are not going to pretend there is. If that changes, the name of the custodian will appear on this page before anywhere else.
Because the controller and the data are in the European Union, an administrator of a MemoriesBox estate would still be bound by the GDPR. Personal data is not an ordinary asset that can simply be sold to the highest bidder for any purpose. See "What the law says" below for the specific articles.
What we can also say is that StoryFile's archive changed hands in a bankruptcy sale in February 2025. If you want certainty about who holds a recording of your mother in five years, the only mechanism that gives it to you is your own exported copy.
What we can't promise
- We cannot promise the company survives. We are at version 0.4.1. That number is published deliberately, and it means pre-1.0.
- We hold no SOC 2 and no ISO 27001 certification. Memory Murals and Avataari, in the adjacent market, do publish security certifications. We compete on where the data sits, not on a badge we have not earned.
- We cannot promise the avatar survives us. If the servers stop, the conversation stops. The audio and the transcript are the durable part, which is why the export page matters more than this one.
- We cannot promise a third-party model vendor keeps a voice model available or transferable. Project December is the precedent for that exact failure, and the decision was taken two companies upstream of the user.
- We cannot promise a file format will still open in fifty years. Nobody can. We can tell you which formats you are holding, so a future family member knows what they have.
- We cannot promise to be here when it matters most. We can only make ourselves less necessary.
What the law says
- GDPR Article 20 gives you the right to receive your personal data in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, and to transmit it to another controller. This right does not disappear because a company is in difficulty. (Regulation (EU) 2016/679)
- GDPR Article 15(3) gives you the right to a copy of the personal data being processed.
- GDPR Article 5(1)(b), purpose limitation, is the article that matters in an insolvency. Personal data collected to build a family archive cannot lawfully be repurposed by a buyer for something else, and Articles 44 to 49 restrict transferring it outside the EEA.
- GDPR Article 28 binds our processors by contract, which is why the sub-processor list on /trust/where-your-data-lives is a legal instrument and not a courtesy.
- EU AI Act Article 50 transparency obligations have applied since 2 August 2026 and would bind a successor operating the same service. (Article 50, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689)
None of this makes a company immortal. It makes the wreckage more governed than it was in the United States in 2024.
Questions people ask
What happens to my recordings if MemoriesBox goes out of business?
Anything you have exported is unaffected, because those files sit on your own drive and do not need us. For anything still only on our servers there is a written procedure: at least ninety days' notice to every account and every key holder, export open to everyone for the whole period, voice models deleted at the vendor on the last day, and a commitment not to sell recordings as an asset. We still tell people to export early, because a copy on your own drive is the only part no procedure can touch.
Can I download everything before that happens?
Yes. Export is available now and is not a farewell feature. Details, formats and the current limits are on /trust/export.
What happens if I stop paying?
Nothing is deleted. Everything already recorded stays, you and any released heirs can still listen and download, and a subscription only pays for adding more. We write when it ends, after a month, and once a year; if the letters go unanswered we do nothing. The only thing that deletes a recording is you asking. It is in the Terms.
Would the avatar still work if the company closed?
No. The avatar is a running service and it stops when the service stops. The recordings, the transcripts and the person's own voice as recorded are the parts that survive, because they are files.
Has this really happened to other companies?
Five times since 2021, in ways anyone can check: StoryFile filed for Chapter 11 on 5 May 2024 owing $150,000 in customer refunds, Project December lost its model access in 2021, HereAfter AI's site returns 404 on every path, MyHeritage confirmed DeepStory’s discontinuation in an August 2025 notice; users reported it had stopped accepting new creations by July 2025, and Replika removed features in February 2023.
Related: How MemoriesBox compares with every other way to keep a voice · The full comparison table · How the voice clone is made · Where your data lives
If you have read this far and still want to record someone, start here. $139 a year, first 14 days free, cancel anytime.