HereAfter AI is shutting down: what happened, and how to save what you recorded

HereAfter AI: a life-story interview app, grown from James Vlahos's 2017 Dadbot, that saved each answer as a real audio recording so family members could later ask questions and hear the storyteller reply.

Persona: the AI version of you that you build on Afterlife.ai™ while you are alive, from your own memories, values and cloned voice, which answers your family in your words.

Executor Lock™: Idy's patent-pending system of named executors, Trusted Contacts, a verified death report and a sealed snapshot of your Persona that can never be changed.

Digital executor: the person you name to carry out your wishes for your accounts, files and AI likeness after you die.

No, HereAfter AI is not working as a product, and families should treat the service as closed. The main website, hereafter.ai, returned an HTTP 404 error on our checks on September 30 and October 1, 2026, after a farewell notice replaced the homepage in July 2026. The separate web app address, app.hereafter.ai, still loaded the HereAfter web app when we checked on October 1, 2026, so it is worth one attempt to sign in before anything else. The company has never announced a deadline, and that silence is the strongest reason to act this week.

The public tracker Killed by AI lists HereAfter AI as a wind-down and records that the website itself became inaccessible on August 18, 2026 (Killed by AI). The same entry says the founder left the company in January 2024 and that the app was last updated in September 2023. None of that changes what a family should do next, which is to request every file now and keep asking until the files arrive. For the full dated record, read the dated HereAfter AI timeline.

HereAfter AI grew out of one of the most human projects in modern software, a son recording his father's stories, jokes and songs while his father was alive, then building a way for the family to hear them again by asking questions. An interviewer guided each storyteller through their life chapter by chapter, and every answer was stored as real recorded audio. When a granddaughter later asked about a wedding day, what played was her grandfather, in his own breath and timing, telling the story he chose to tell. That design is exactly why the files sitting in those accounts are worth rescuing now.

The record below is dated from our own checks of the live HereAfter site and from public sources. Every line is a snapshot of what we could verify on the date shown, and we update the page whenever the status changes. If you are reading this later, treat each line as a dated record and check the status table at the top of the page first.

There was no scandal, no dramatic collapse and no acquisition announcement, and the company has published no explanation, deadline or refund policy alongside the notice. A small team appears to have simply run out of road, which happens to good companies, and HereAfter was a good company. Even so, a well-made product with real recordings ended with a notice and an error page, and families were left to ask for their own files one email at a time. For the product itself, read what HereAfter AI was and our HereAfter AI review.

You get your recordings out of HereAfter AI by trying the web app once, then emailing support@hereafter.ai from the address on your account and asking for a complete export. Email is the whole mechanism the company named, so write the email today. You are asking a winding-down team for a careful favor, and the clearer your request, the easier it is to honor. The steps below put the fastest options first.

1. Try the HereAfter web app first. Go to app.hereafter.ai and sign in with the email or Google account you used, and download anything the app still lets you download.

2. Find the email address on the account. Search your inbox and your card statements for HereAfter receipts, because a request sent from the registered address is the easiest one for the team to verify.

3. Email support@hereafter.ai from that address. Ask for every audio recording, every transcript, the interview question each recording answers, and any photos attached to stories, in MP3 or another standard format.

4. Search your own devices and ask relatives. Anyone on the Unlimited plan could download MP3s, so check old laptops, phones and cloud drives, and ask every relative who listened whether they saved a copy.

5. Save every file in three places. Keep two copies on separate drives you own and one in a cloud account you control.

6. Label each file with its question and date. A folder of unlabeled audio is a puzzle, while the same folder with question titles and transcripts is a life story.

7. Follow up every week until the files arrive. Keep a record of every request and reply, and send account details only to support@hereafter.ai, the address HereAfter itself named.

You can send the template below as it stands, filling in the brackets with your own details. It asks for the audio and also for the context around the audio, because the question each recording answers is what turns a folder of files into a life story. Keep a copy of the email you send, with the date, so every follow-up can quote your first request.

Subject: Recording export request for [your account email]. Hello. I am a HereAfter customer, account email [your account email]. Following the notice on your homepage, I would like to request a complete export of my account: all audio recordings, transcripts if available, the interview questions each recording answers, and any photos attached to our stories. MP3 or any standard format is fine. I am happy to verify the account however you need. Thank you for what you built. [Your name]

If the storyteller in your account has already died, those recordings may be the last of their voice your family will ever hold, and nothing made later replaces an original. Retrieve the files first, and let every other decision wait until they are safe. For the deeper walkthrough on file formats, labeling and long-term storage, read how to save your HereAfter recordings.

Once the files arrive, protect them, label them and share them, in that order. Copy the folder to your two drives and your cloud account the same day, and check that every file plays. Then rename each file with the storyteller's name, the question and the date, and keep the transcripts beside the audio. Finally, send a copy to every relative who would want one, because a recording held in five homes survives far longer than a recording held in one.

If the storyteller is still alive, the recordings become the starting point for something new. Play a recording together, ask the follow-up question you always wanted to ask, and let your parent retell the story in a Persona, where the memory joins a growing map of their life and can answer the next question in their own voice. The original file stays exactly as it is, as the family archive, and the Persona carries the stories forward with your parent deciding who may hear them later. For more on keeping a voice, read how to preserve a parent's voice.

HereAfter AI cost $3.99, $5.99 or $7.99 a month, depending on the plan, when we checked the live site on July 18, 2026. Full MP3 downloads of a family's own recordings came only with the $7.99 Unlimited plan, which is why many subscribers on the cheaper plans have no copy of their own audio today. The prices below are in US dollars and are recorded for reference, since the plans are no longer sold.

The download rule is the detail that matters most in hindsight. A family on the Unlimited plan could hold its own copies the whole time, while every other family depended on the company staying open. For the full price history, read HereAfter AI pricing.

HereAfter is one of at least eight well-known AI legacy, avatar and companion services that have closed, been sold, changed direction or been forced to change by a regulator since 2023. The pattern holds across the United States, Europe and New Zealand. A person's recordings and likeness are only as safe as the company, the balance sheet and the contract behind them. The full stories of two of them are in what happened to StoryFile and what happened to Eternos.

The most instructive entry is a person. Michael Bommer, a 61-year-old Berlin entrepreneur with terminal colon cancer, spent two months and about 25 hours of talking to build an interactive AI of himself with Eternos, as the company's first client (Fortune, via AP, June 4, 2024). He did everything right, and the company then changed direction. Under its current name, the company's terms say that on cancellation it deletes or de-identifies the content and any AI a user created (Uare.ai Terms, June 30, 2026), which is the standard any family should check before trusting a service with a parent.

Researchers see the same gap across the whole category. A Lehigh University audit of 93 AI "afterlife" services found that 82 publish thin or no information on who has authority over a recreation, and 77 say little about deletion or export (arXiv, August 28, 2026). For the general lesson, read what happens when a digital legacy company shuts down. Meta's own record shows the same pattern at the largest scale, and our guide to Meta's AI experiments with real people covers its celebrity characters, AI Studio and its patent to simulate dead users.

The biggest failure in the category came in October 2026, when Character.AI, the chatbot app with about 12 million monthly users, filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware and its users' chats were left out of the only bid for its technology. Our guide to the Character.AI bankruptcy covers what happens to those chats and how to save them.

Before you move your family's stories anywhere, ask seven questions and expect written answers. HereAfter's families learned that a beautiful product can still end with an error page, and the questions below are the ones that decide whether the next service ends the same way. Ask them of every company you consider, including us, and treat silence as a no.

1. How does the service end, and is the ending in the contract?

2. Who decides what happens to the recordings and the AI after I die, and how do you check that a death is real?

3. Can anyone change who I am after I die, including my family or the company?

4. Do you delete accounts that go quiet?

5. If you are sold or close, what passes to the buyer, and what stays protected?

6. What do we keep in our own hands the whole time?

7. Who pays after I die, and what does my family see first?

Question two is the one almost no company in this category can answer, and answering that question is why we built Executor Lock™. When we read the published terms of nine AI twin and avatar platforms, about 85,000 words in total, none of them said what happens to your clone, your account or your earnings when you die (terms checked October 1, 2026). For the ownership question in depth, read who owns your AI twin after you die.

Executor Lock™ writes the ending of your Persona while you are alive, so nobody has to improvise it after you die. You name the people, they accept the job in writing, and the product follows the same six steps for every Afterlife.ai™ Persona.

1. Name your people. You name one or more executors and your Trusted Contacts, and each one accepts the Executor Lock™ Agreement while you are alive.

2. Report. After your death, an executor or a Trusted Contact you named uploads evidence, such as a death certificate or a funeral notice.

3. Check. Automated analysis reads the evidence, and then a person reviews the evidence before anything changes.

4. Cooling-off. Seven days pass in which every executor is told about the report and can dispute the report, and you can cancel a false report with proof of life.

5. Lock. Your Persona becomes a sealed snapshot of every memory as the memory stood that day, with nothing pruned, nothing re-weighted and a tamper-evident seal on the record.

6. Release. Your release rules for photos, memories and live conversation take effect for the people you named.

After the lock, your executor can invite the people you named who never accepted their invitation, hand the executor role to someone else, and ask Idy to delete your Persona. Your executor cannot unlock your Persona, edit a memory or change who you are, and nothing in the product can change your personality after the lock. New short-term memories and big life events still reach your Persona, so a grandchild can share good news and your Persona remembers the news while staying exactly who you were. For the whole role, read what a digital executor does.

Idy built the ending first because the HereAfter story is the predictable result of building the product and leaving the ending for later. Our first years went into the questions that most personal AI companies skip, which are who controls your likeness while you live, who decides about the likeness when you die, who may see what, and how consent is recorded so that software obeys the consent. The answer is Executor Lock™, built on Idy's 78 patents pending, which cover verifying a death before control of a Persona changes hands, handing authority to a named executor, sealing a memory record that becomes permanent at the handover, and keeping a Persona the same person when the underlying AI models change. Idy has also filed two international patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty.

Because that foundation came first, one Idy twin can work as you while you live, keep answering and booking while you are away, and pass to the people you named when you die. That is how the Afterlife.ai™ Twin built for families works, on the same Executor Lock™. Video-avatar tools such as Tavus, HeyGen and Synthesia were built for marketing and support videos, and creator clones such as Delphi and Uare.ai were built to answer an audience, so none of them names an executor or plans for its owner's death. Life-story apps such as HereAfter were built to record, and the recording was beautiful, while the ending was left to a notice on a homepage.

The best alternative to HereAfter AI depends on what HereAfter was for your family. Some families want the interviews to continue, some want a keepsake book on a shelf, and some want a voice that can still answer a new question. The table compares the main options, with prices in US dollars, and every option is better with the original HereAfter files saved first.

A printed book is the right choice when paper is the keepsake your family wants, and our page on HereAfter AI compared with StoryWorth covers that choice in depth. Storii suits a parent who tells stories best over the phone. Afterlife.ai™ is the choice for a family that wants a parent's voice to keep answering new questions, with the parent deciding the ending in advance. Every Persona speaks in the storyteller's own cloned voice and shows their life on the Mind Map, and Persona Video turns the Persona into video messages in the storyteller's face and voice, made from one 30-second recording of the storyteller, with the first video free.

Worked example: what an ending costs over 20 years. HereAfter's Unlimited plan, at $7.99 a month, would have cost a family $1,917.60 over twenty years, with no executor and no written ending. Afterlife.ai™ Legacy at $14.99 a month costs $3,597.60 over the same twenty years, and the 20-year Legacy plan, which includes everything in Eternal, costs $1,299 once, which is $64.95 a year and $618.60 less than twenty years of HereAfter's top plan would have cost. The table shows all three, with the ending each one buys.

The prepaid plan is the one that answers HereAfter's failure most directly, because the years are paid before anything can go wrong and the people who take over are named in advance. Continuity credits cover a shorter bridge, at $149 for 12 months of Legacy or $279 for 24 months, for families who prefer to pay monthly while the storyteller is alive. For a full head-to-head, read Afterlife.ai™ compared with HereAfter AI, and for every plan, read every Afterlife.ai™ plan and price.

You start again by helping your parent build their own Persona, in their own account, with the ending decided on the first day. The order below puts the ending first, which is the step HereAfter's families never got. Most families finish the first five steps in an afternoon.

1. Open your parent's free account together. The free build holds 25 memories, needs no card and never expires, and your parent owns the account.

2. Name the executor and Trusted Contacts first. Your parent chooses who takes over and who may have access, and each person accepts the Executor Lock™ Agreement.

3. Set the release rules. Your parent decides whether photos, memories and live conversation are released to the family after the lock.

4. Record the first stories. Play a saved HereAfter recording if you have one, and let your parent retell the story in conversation with the Persona.

5. Clone your parent's voice and record a Persona Video. The Persona then speaks in your parent's own voice, and one 30-second recording lets Persona Video make messages in your parent's own face and voice.

6. Keep going on the Mind Map. The map shows which chapters of your parent's life are covered, so every conversation has a starting point.

Our Terms bar anyone from building a Persona of another person without that person's explicit written consent (section 5.1), and the service is for adults 18 and over (section 2.1). That rule is what makes a parent's Persona trustworthy later, because every word in the Persona came from the parent. For a longer guide, read how to make an AI version of yourself, and for why consent matters so much, read what a griefbot is, and why consent changes everything.

The ending matters more in 2026 because copies of people are now made after they die whether or not anyone planned for them. Within a day of Dolly Parton's death on August 25, 2026, a fake AI recording of her "final wish" was spreading online, and Snopes rated the clip Fake (Snopes). On September 30, 2026, an Arizona appeals court vacated a sentence because the judge relied on an AI video of a dead man speaking words his family wrote (Fox 10 Phoenix). In both cases nobody could point to rules the person had set while alive.

James Earl Jones showed the alternative. In 2022 he signed a deal letting Lucasfilm generate Darth Vader's voice from archival recordings, two years before he died on September 9, 2024 (Wikipedia), so nobody had to guess or sue. Cambridge researchers have called for exactly that kind of advance consent, along with ways to retire a recreation with dignity (University of Cambridge, May 9, 2024). Governments are writing the same rule into law, and the country-by-country picture is in deepfake and AI likeness laws by country.

Yes, if the storyteller is alive and willing, and only with a service that shows you the ending in writing before you start. HereAfter proved that families want to hear a parent's voice answer their questions, and the recordings it made are worth every effort to rescue. The next service has to pass a harder test, which is whether what you build will still be there, governed by the people your parent chose, when the grandchildren ask. Afterlife.ai™ was built to pass that test, starting free.

1. Build your Persona free, no card

2. Start your parent's Persona together, free

3. Name your executor before you record

We checked hereafter.ai and app.hereafter.ai by hand on the dates shown, read the Killed by AI entry, the Wired, Westfair, AV Interactive, TechCrunch, STAT, Fortune and PYMNTS reporting linked above, the published terms of the AI twin and avatar platforms named in the successor table, the Lehigh University and University of Cambridge research, and the price pages of StoryWorth, Storii and Remento. Every outside fact links to its source and date.

• the dated HereAfter AI timeline

• how to save your HereAfter recordings

• what a griefbot is, and why consent changes everything

• who owns your AI twin after you die

• the best digital twin apps compared

• Executor Lock™