Relief

Youper is shutting down on 30 September 2026

If you have been journalling in it, the thing that matters is the export. Everything else can wait.

The deadline

Youper's own site carries the notice: “Youper is shutting down September 30, 2026 — export your data.” The full statement is at youper.ai/notice, and it is worth reading rather than taking my summary of it.

The company's words: “Beginning October 1, 2026, all user accounts, chat histories, and personal information will be securely and permanently deleted from our servers and backups”, and “After September 30, 2026, our support team will no longer be able to retrieve your data.”

So there is a window, and after it your entries are not recoverable by anyone, including Youper.

Two smaller things from the same notice, because they save people a phone call. Auto-renewing subscriptions have already been disabled — there are no further charges to cancel. If you have time left on a prepaid plan, Youper says it will email instructions, and refunds go through Apple or Google rather than through Youper.

How to export

Correcting what this page said first. An earlier version treated the in-app route as hearsay. It is not — it is the route Youper gives first, in its own notice: “Open the Youper app and go to Settings. Select 'Request my data'.” If the app is still on your phone, start there.

If you no longer have it installed, Youper's second route is the web export at start.youper.ai/export-data. Checked on 26 August 2026: the page loads and asks you to sign in — email and password, or Continue with Google, or Continue with Apple. That matters more than it sounds. If you signed up years ago and cannot remember which method you used, sort that out now rather than on 29 September; the page has a “forgot my password” link for a reason. I have no Youper account, so I have not seen what the export produces once you are past that screen, and I am not going to guess.

If the export itself goes wrong, the notice names hello@youper.ai and asks people to write well in advance of the closure date rather than at the end.

Do it before you decide anything else. Choosing a new app can wait five weeks; the export cannot.

One thing that makes this easy to miss

The listing is gone before the service is. Checked on 26 August 2026 through Apple's lookup API, with the publisher name verified rather than matched by title: id1060691513 returns no result in the US, UK, Canadian, Australian, German or Brazilian storefronts, on requests where a control app returned normally. The Google Play listing for com.hellotars.youper returns 404 while a control package returns 200.

One caveat, because a sweeping version of this would be wrong: the withdrawal is not everywhere. In the Antigua & Barbuda storefront the app still resolves, and a search for “youper” there returns it as the first result, published by YOUPER, INC. So “it no longer comes up in a search” is true where nearly every reader of this page is, and false somewhere.

If it is still installed on your phone it keeps working for now, and nothing obliges you to open it between now and the deadline.

A correction to what this page said before

The first version of this page said the people most likely to lose their writing are the ones who stopped using Youper a while ago. Youper's own notice says otherwise, and I had not read it closely enough:

“If you have not used Youper in over a year, there's no data to be exported. Under our Terms of Use, accounts inactive for more than 12 months have already been deleted, so there is no data to export.”

So for the group I was most worried about, this page was pointing at a rescue that cannot work. If you last opened Youper in 2024, there is most likely nothing left to save, and the honest thing is to say so rather than send you through a password reset to find out.

Who the deadline is actually for: anyone who has used Youper within the last twelve months. That still includes a quiet group — people who journalled in it through the spring, stopped in the summer, and will never see an in-app notice because they do not open the app. They have data, they have five weeks, and nothing is going to tell them.

If you want somewhere else to keep a thought record

You do not need an app. A thought record is a page with columns on it, and the format is here, free, with nothing to sign up for.

If you would rather have an app, each of these was looked up by ID on 26 August 2026, with the publisher name checked rather than the title matched. Method and limits on the checked list:

Nothing on this page depends on you choosing any of them.