Woebot has shut down. What now?

On 30 June 2025, Woebot's consumer app went offline. If you'd used it — and millions of people had, since 2017 — the little CBT chatbot with the daily check-ins simply stopped being somewhere you could go. A year on, people are still searching for what to do instead, which is why we're writing this. We make a mental health companion ourselves, so we have an obvious interest here; we'll flag it clearly when we get to it, and we'll try to earn your trust in the meantime by being straight about everything else.

What actually happened

Woebot was, by any fair measure, one of the good ones. It was built by psychologists, led by its founder Alison Darcy, and it did something almost nothing else in this space bothered to do: it tested itself. A randomised controlled trial back in 2017 found it reduced symptoms of depression in two weeks, and studies kept coming after that. It wasn't a gimmick. It was careful, scripted, evidence-informed CBT delivered through a friendly chat window.

So why did it close? Not because users left, and not because the evidence fell apart. By the company's own account, it came down to regulation and money. Woebot had spent years — and well over a hundred million dollars of investment — pursuing formal authorisation from the US Food and Drug Administration. It earned an FDA "Breakthrough Device" designation for one of its programmes, but full marketing authorisation never came, and the ground kept moving: by 2024 large language models had changed what conversational AI could do, while the rules for using them in regulated mental health products hadn't been written yet. Darcy said, in effect, that the technology was moving faster than the regulators. The company retired the consumer app and moved on.

There's a sober lesson in that for the whole category, and it isn't "regulation bad." Regulation of medical claims exists for good reasons. The lesson is narrower: an app that positions itself as a medical treatment takes on a mountain that even a well-funded, well-run, genuinely evidence-based company couldn't climb in time. Most of the apps in this space — ours included — deliberately live on the other side of that line: companions and wellbeing tools, not treatments. That's not a loophole; it's a different, honest promise. But it means the burden is on each app to be clear about what it is and isn't, because no regulator is doing that clearly for you yet.

The uncomfortable part: apps can disappear

Here's the bit almost nobody talks about. When Woebot closed, every one of those daily check-ins, mood logs and conversations ended with it. For some people that was years of a private record — gone, or at best exported in a hurry during the wind-down window, if they saw the announcement at all.

Any app can disappear. Funding runs out, companies pivot, stores change their rules. So when you choose the next thing, it's worth asking a question that has nothing to do with features: can I take my history with me? An app that lets you export your data at any time — not just during a shutdown — is an app that respects that your record belongs to you and not to it. It's also, frankly, a decent proxy for how a company thinks about you in general.

How to choose a replacement

Start with what Woebot actually was for you, because it was different things to different people. For some it was the structured CBT exercises — the thought-untangling, the reframing. For others it was the ritual: a daily check-in that kept them noticing how they were doing. And for others it was simpler and deeper than either: somewhere to say things out loud that had nowhere else to go.

Those point at different replacements. Whatever you look at, we'd suggest the same short checklist. Does it say plainly what it is — a companion, a self-care tool — rather than implying it's therapy? Does it know its limits, and signpost real crisis help rather than trying to handle a crisis itself? What does it ask about you before you can start, and where does that information go? Can you export your history, and does delete actually mean delete? None of that tells you whether an app will feel right — only trying it does — but it filters out the ones that haven't thought hard about the responsibility they're taking on.

The alternative, honestly

What about just using ChatGPT? Plenty of people do but general chatbots aren't designed for this: your conversations sit in an account tied to your identity and saved by default, there's no mood record building quietly in the background, and nobody has sat down and thought carefully about what should happen when someone arrives in genuine crisis. For occasional thinking-out-loud it's fine. As the place you take your worst days, it wasn't built for that job.

Which brings us to Nagi — and here's our declared interest: this is ours, so weigh what follows accordingly. Nagi & Me is a mental health companion you talk to by text or voice, with a mood diary that builds the kind of noticing habit Woebot's check-ins built. The thing we obsess over is anonymity: we never ask for your email, your name, or anything that identifies you — recovery works through a code only you hold, so there is nothing about you for us to look up, lose, or be made to hand over. You can export or erase everything, any time. The first week is free, and it's on Google Play and the web today, with iPhone coming. And the boundary, stated plainly: Nagi is a companion, not therapy and not a medical device, it's for adults (18+), and it is not a crisis service — real crisis lines are at the bottom of this page.

There are other apps in this space, and the checklist above will serve you well with any of them. We'd simply rather show you our answers to it than write their brochures.

The quiet takeaway

Woebot's shutdown wasn't a verdict on whether talking to an AI about your mental health can help. The evidence it left behind suggests it can, modestly and honestly, for the everyday work of noticing and untangling. Its closure was about the machinery of medical regulation meeting a fast-moving technology — a collision that will shape this category for years.

For you, the practical part is smaller: know what the app you choose is, check you can leave with your history, and keep expectations honest. If you'd like our longer thinking on the privacy side of that choice, we've written an honest guide to anonymous mental health apps — including the questions we think cut through the marketing, ours included.

— The Nagi team

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Nagi is a mental health companion, not a medical device, and nothing here is medical advice. Details about other apps are accurate to the best of our knowledge as of July 2026 — check their own sites for the current picture. If you're struggling, please reach out to a professional or someone you trust.