HereAfter AI pricing: what the plans cost, and what happens to your recordings now

HereAfter AI's final published pricing was three monthly subscriptions: Starter at $3.99, Storyteller at $5.99, and Unlimited at $7.99 per month, with one-time purchases of $99.99, $159.99, and $199.99 still listed on the App Store as of August 18, 2026. The app itself is free to download; the paid tiers carried the actual product.

In 2026, though, the price list is only half the answer. HereAfter's homepage carried a shutdown notice in July 2026, and as of August 18, 2026 that homepage returns an error page altogether. So this page does three jobs: it records what HereAfter AI costs, it explains what a lapsed subscription means during a wind-down, and it compares the numbers honestly with the current field, including our own plans. One disclosure first: Afterlife.ai™ is a competitor of HereAfter AI, and you should read everything here knowing that. The facts below were checked by hand on August 18, 2026.

What does HereAfter AI cost?

Here is the full price list, verified today against HereAfter AI's US App Store listing, which still displays the company's in-app purchases:

• Starter Plan: $3.99 per month

• Storyteller Plan: $5.99 per month

• Unlimited Plan: $7.99 per month

• Storyteller Single Payment: $159.99, one time

• Unlimited Single Payment: $199.99, one time

• A further one-time purchase listed simply as HereAfter AI: $99.99

The app download is free, so the real cost of HereAfter was always the subscription behind the interviewer. Those monthly prices match the company's final published pricing, making the App Store listing the last public record of what HereAfter charged.

Two dates matter when you read that list. The app was last updated in September 2023. The company's own pricing and help pages are no longer online, and the homepage that carried the July shutdown notice now returns an error. A price can stay listed long after the product behind that price has stopped moving.

What did each HereAfter AI tier include?

Honestly, the tier-by-tier feature list is no longer published anywhere we can verify. The company's FAQ and help pages went offline during the wind-down, so as of August 2026 there is no official source describing exactly what separated Starter from Storyteller. Rather than reconstruct the details from memory, we will tell you what can still be established.

The product itself worked the same way at every level: a guided interviewer asked life-story questions, each answer was stored as real recorded audio in the storyteller's own voice, photos could be attached, and invited family members could ask questions and hear the recorded answers play back. The tiers mainly governed how much you could record and share.

One tier boundary is worth naming because it still shapes what families face today: full MP3 downloads of your own recordings were a feature of the Unlimited tier only. A Starter or Storyteller subscriber paying $3.99 or $5.99 a month had no built-in way to export their audio, which is why so many households hold years of recordings and not one local copy. If that is your situation, the export path comes first and the pricing debate second: our guide to saving your HereAfter recordings walks through the request, template included.

Should you start paying for HereAfter AI in 2026?

No. We say that plainly, and not as a rival talking down a competitor. HereAfter earned its reputation, and the recordings families made there are worth everything. But the company's homepage carried a shutdown notice in July 2026, the website now returns errors, and the app has not been updated since September 2023. The full timeline, with each fact dated, is in our account of the HereAfter AI shutdown.

A subscription still listed on an app store is not the same thing as a maintained service. Even if a new purchase were to go through, you would be paying into a product whose team has said goodbye, and whose only published customer channel is a support email address for retrieving data. Money aside, the deeper cost is time: hours of interviews recorded into a closing service are hours you may spend again elsewhere.

If you are an existing subscriber, the calculation is different. Whether you keep paying through the wind-down matters far less than whether you get your files out.

What happens to your recordings if your subscription lapses?

Under normal circumstances this answer would come from the company's help pages. Those pages are gone, so as of August 2026 HereAfter publishes no official policy on what a lapsed subscription means for stored recordings. We will not invent one. What can be said is structural: the recordings live on HereAfter's servers, most subscribers never had a download feature, and a wind-down eventually decommissions servers.

The price that matters is not the monthly fee. It is what you keep when the payments stop.

So treat every tier, active or lapsed, as the same case: request a complete export now. The published retrieval channel is support@hereafter.ai, and the request should come from the email address on the account. Ask for every audio recording in original quality, all photos, transcripts if they exist, and the question list with dates, then store the files in three places you control. No retrieval deadline has been announced, and that is a reason to move this week, not a reason to relax: wind-downs get quieter, not louder.

Whatever HereAfter cost per month, the families who end up whole are the ones holding their own files. A subscription price only measures the service while the service exists.

How does HereAfter AI pricing compare with Afterlife AI™?

Here is the comparison row, stated as plainly as we can manage given that we are one side of it. HereAfter charged $3.99 to $7.99 per month for guided audio recording and playback. Afterlife AI™ prices differently because the product does something different: guided capture builds your Persona, a living likeness that remembers your stories and answers in your way, rather than replaying fixed recordings.

• Afterlife AI™ Free: a one-time build budget of 50 memories, free, no card required, and your build never expires

• Legacy: $14.99 per month, for ongoing conversation, growing memory, and release rules for the people you choose

• Eternal: $29.99 per month, the full product, including consent-based voice preservation so your Persona can speak in a voice built from yours, recorded with your documented permission while you are alive

Every plan is governed by Executor Lock™: at the moment you choose, the record behind your Persona is frozen as a perfect snapshot, and after you die your Executor governs access but cannot rewrite who you were. The exact contents of each plan live on our plans page, and the build itself costs nothing to try: start with the free build and see whether the approach feels right before any money changes hands.

Yes, our paid plans cost more per month than HereAfter did. That gap is deliberate, and it is the uncomfortable lesson of this category. HereAfter's prices were modest, and modest prices asked a small team to carry a decades-long promise. We would rather charge a price that can keep the promise than a price that wins the comparison table. Hold us to that: the seven questions to ask any company in this category, ours included, are in the shutdown piece above.

How does HereAfter AI pricing compare with the rest of the field?

Different families used HereAfter for different things, so the fair comparison depends on what the subscription was doing for you. As of August 2026, the honest map looks like this:

• StoryWorth, $59 to $199 per year: weekly email prompts that become a printed book. The right choice when paper is the keepsake you want; there is no voice playback or conversation. We break down the tiers in our StoryWorth pricing guide.

• Storii, $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year: records life stories over ordinary phone calls, which makes Storii the practical pick for a parent without a smartphone.

• Remento, $99 per year: prompted recordings that become a printed book with QR codes linking back to the original audio.

• Keeping your files yourself: free. Two local copies on separate drives plus one cloud copy will outlive every subscription on this list.

If you want the wider decision framework rather than a price sheet, we keep a full guide to the alternatives to HereAfter AI and a broader review of the best digital legacy apps as of this year. And for the direct feature-by-feature match against us, the Afterlife AI™ versus HereAfter AI comparison goes deeper than one row can.

What is a fair price for permanence?

The uncomfortable truth HereAfter's pricing teaches is that this category cannot be judged on monthly cost alone. StoryFile, Eternos, and HereAfter were three of the best-known names in preserving people, and within roughly two years all three shut down, pivoted, or left the category. Demand was never the problem. The economics of a small subscription carrying an unlimited promise were.

So when you compare prices, compare exits too. Before any money moves, ask what you can export, in what formats, at which tier, and what the written plan is if the company closes. A service that deserves your family's stories can answer calmly and specifically, whether that service costs $3.99 or $29.99 a month. HereAfter's users are living the version of this question that arrives without warning. The next archive your family builds should be priced, and engineered, so that question never has to be asked again.