Maple Family Assistant Is Shutting Down: What Families Can Use Instead

Maple, the free all in one family organizer built by former Shopify executives, is shutting down on December 31, 2026. The announcement sits on the official Maple homepage: accounts close at the end of the year, annual subscriptions no longer renew, and all family data is permanently deleted after the shutdown date. The news follows the acquisition of Maple's team by Wander, a luxury travel company, announced in late July 2026.

If your family runs on Maple, you have a deadline. Export your data, pick a replacement, and move before the end of December. Here is what happened, and an honest guide to where to go next.

Maple shuts down December 31, 2026. Accounts close, and all family data is permanently deleted after that date. The team was acquired by the travel company Wander in July 2026. Families should export their data from the app now and choose a replacement before the deadline.

What Is Happening to Maple?

Maple launched as an ambitious answer to family chaos: one free app bundling a shared calendar, meal planner, recipe box, shopping lists, a family email inbox, to-do lists, and project folders, with AI that read incoming family emails and turned them into calendar events and tasks. It was built by Grow Maple Inc., founded by Michael Perry and Mike Taylor, both former Shopify executives, and it ran on iOS, Android, and the web with a paid tier for external calendar sync and unlimited AI.

In late July 2026, Wander, a luxury travel and vacation rental company, acquired the Maple team. Perry became a product executive at Wander. For a few days the future of the app itself was an open question. The official Maple homepage answered it: the app shuts down on December 31, 2026, and all user data is permanently deleted after that date. The app has already been removed from the App Store.

None of this is a criticism of the product. Maple was one of the better family organizers, and it was genuinely free. It is simply what happens to venture backed apps: teams get acquired, priorities change, and the app your family depends on becomes someone's former project.

What to Do Before December 31

Three steps, in order:

1. Export your data now. Maple's shutdown notice urges families to export their data before accounts close. Do not wait for December: the recipes, lists, and family records you have built up are deleted permanently after the deadline.
2. Choose the replacement based on what you actually used. If Maple was mostly your shared calendar, you need a calendar. If it was the meal planner and lists, you need those. If it was the AI reading school emails, that is a different category. The next section sorts the options by job.
3. Run both for a couple of weeks. Set up the new system while Maple still works, so nothing falls through the transition. The permission slip that gets missed during a migration is the exact failure these apps exist to prevent.

The Best Maple Alternatives in 2026

The honest answer depends on which job Maple did for your family.

For the simple shared family calendar: Cozi. The long running classic. Color coded calendars, shopping lists, and meal plans that grandparents adopt without help. It is almost entirely manual, so the noticing and remembering stay with whoever runs it, but as a dependable shared calendar it is the easiest landing spot.

For shared household admin between two adults: Ohai. An AI household assistant that manages calendars and to-do lists and pulls events out of school emails, at its best when both adults work from the same shared system. It requires a subscription.

For a visible kitchen command center: Nori. A family hub built around a shared screen for the home, fed by voice, photo, and email. It requires buying hardware, which is its charm and its constraint.

For school email automation: Babs. A newer tool that connects to Gmail, extracts events and deadlines from school and activity emails, and proposes them for one tap approval into your calendar. It is promising and currently free, but it is in a waitlist gated private beta, so you cannot simply download it today.

For mental load framing on iPhone: Melo. Previously called MentalLoad.ai, an early text based organizer aimed at the maternal mental load, with delegation to partner, nanny, or grandparents. It is iPhone only and very young, with a tiny user base so far.

For the person carrying the load: AlphaMa. We are honest about our angle here: AlphaMa is our app, and it is built for a different layer than Maple was. Maple organized the family's information. AlphaMa is built around the person who does the organizing, most often the mother. You talk to it naturally, by voice, while your hands are full, and it captures the tasks, appointments, and worries on its own. It reads family logistics from Gmail, syncs Google Calendar, plans meals, and hands chores to your partner over WhatsApp, so your partner needs no new app. And it does the one thing no family organizer attempts: it supports the person underneath the load, with conversations built on cognitive behavioral techniques, at 2 PM or 2 AM. It is free right now on iOS and Android.

A fuller ranked comparison lives at best AI assistant for families and best AI apps for moms.

Milo in January. Maple in December. The Pattern Matters.

Maple is the second beloved family assistant to close in 2026. Milo, the SMS based family assistant backed by OpenAI, shut down in January after six years. Two closures in one year is not a coincidence. Family coordination is a hard, low margin business, and the apps serving it come and go.

That has a practical consequence for the family relying on the app. When a family organizer closes, the data disappears, but the load does not. Every open loop the app was holding (the recurring orthodontist appointment, the soccer carpool, the diaper subscription timing) lands back in one person's head, usually the mother's. The mental load is exactly the work of holding those loops, and app churn is one of its hidden taxes.

So whichever replacement you choose, choose it on two questions. Does it actually reduce the invisible work, or only display it? And is the team behind it building for the long run? We built AlphaMa around the first question, and we publish our research so families can judge the second. Wherever your family lands, export your Maple data this month, not in December.