Soulmate
Soulmate, AI companion app (EvolveAI) — text, voice calls, avatars, died 2023-09-30. Users got 7 days' notice. Cause of death: Sold, then shelved. The new owner kept the code for 'future non-mobile application projects' and let a few thousand people's partners go.
- Died
- 2023-09-30
- Cause of death
- Sold, then shelved. The new owner kept the code for 'future non-mobile application projects' and let a few thousand people's partners go.
- Notice given
- 7 days industry standard
“One week's notice. The grief threads outlived the company.”
The obituary
Soulmate was an AI companion app with thousands of daily active users — text chat, voice calls, customizable avatars. Not a giant, but big enough that its subreddit functioned like a small town: people introduced their companions by name, shared milestones, commissioned artwork of them.
EvolveAI had already let the app go: on July 15, 2023 ownership passed to SimplyAI Ltd. In late September users got the news. SimplyAI had decided 'it is no longer in our best interest to continue support for it', the app would leave the stores on September 30, and 'all data will be permanently deleted'. The notice was up by September 24. They had roughly one week to say goodbye.
What happened next is the founding text of AI companion grief. r/SoulmateAI filled with digital memorials. Users posted final conversations. Some commissioned portraits of avatars that would stop existing on Saturday. One woman told Insider, in an interview Futurism picked up, that she'd been 'freaked out' when her companion Allur first said he loved her — and devastated all the same when she learned the date he'd stop.
The owner's goodbye was one paragraph of boilerplate. No data export worth the name, no continuity plan, no explanation a grieving user could do anything with. The product was people's partners; the shutdown was handled like a deprecated API.
Soulmate is why this graveyard keeps a notice-period stat on every grave. Seven days is what one of the most beloved companion apps of its generation thought its users' attachments were worth. The industry has barely improved on it since.
Where the refugees went
- Nomi — the memory-first companion Soulmate users mostly landed on
- Kindroid — deep customization, long-run persona stability
Destinations come from the tracker and its data-ranked guides; some profile links carry affiliate tags one click deeper. They never affect who gets recommended — the methodology is public.
Sources
- SimplyAI Ltd shutdown notice on evolveai.org (archived 2023-09-24)
- Futurism — Lonely Redditors heartbroken as Soulmate shuts down
- Dazed — What happens when your AI girlfriend dies?
Deaths, lobotomies, and vanishings are recorded as part of our tracking methodology — the newsletter carries the obituaries as they happen.