Woebot stored interaction data behind accounts and retired its consumer app in June 2025. Shift is stateless, so there is nothing to inherit, breach, or shut down.
updated 2026-06-13 · etthore labs · methodology
There is one question worth asking about any tool you tell your private thoughts to. Not "is it smart." Not "does it work." Just: what does it keep about you.
Woebot and Shift answer that question in opposite ways. One held a record. The other holds nothing. That single difference is the whole comparison, and it explains what happened when one of them closed.
Woebot was a CBT-style chatbot. You made an account. You chatted, and those interactions were stored on central servers tied to your identity. That is a normal architecture, and it carries a normal consequence: a service that holds your data is a service that has to be wound down when it ends.
Woebot retired its consumer app on June 30, 2025 (source: Woebot Health, June 2025). When a data-holding service shuts down, the accounts, the message history, and the stored interactions become something that has to be handled. Migrated, deleted, archived, or transferred. The point is not that Woebot did anything wrong with it. The point is that there was a "it" at all. A held record is always somebody's problem eventually, including at the end.
That is the structural fact: an account-based, server-storing service can be breached, sold, subpoenaed, or shut down, and in every one of those cases the stored conversation is the thing at stake.
Nothing.
There is no account, no email, no signup, no cookies, no logs. The server is stateless. When you type a sentence, it exists for the length of the conversation and then it is gone. Nothing is written to a record that could be inherited, breached, or wound down later.
This is not a privacy promise on a settings page. It is the architecture, and you can confirm it from the source of the site. There is no data layer to trust because there is no data layer. When you cannot point to a stored conversation, there is nothing to lose in a shutdown, because the record was never written in the first place.
So the question "what happens to my data if Shift closes" has a flat answer. The same thing that happens to it during a normal session. It does not exist.
This matters, so it gets said plainly.
Woebot was clinically studied. Shift is grounded in real method (Person-Centered Theory, Self-Determination Theory, Motivational Interviewing, and the Transtheoretical Model, set out on the method page), but it has not been run through a clinical trial. Those are different kinds of evidence, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
If you want a structured, trial-tested CBT program, a clinically studied tool is the honest recommendation, even though Woebot's consumer app is no longer available.
If you are in crisis, you do not want a chatbot at all. In the US, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Reach a person.
And if your situation is medical, a diagnosis, medication, a condition that needs treatment, that belongs with a clinician. Shift is not a therapist and not medical advice, and it will not pretend to be.
What Shift is for is the part where you want to think out loud, honestly, with no one keeping score and no record left behind.
Woebot kept an account and a history, so when it ended there was something to wind down. Shift keeps nothing, so there is nothing to inherit, nothing to breach, and nothing to shut down.
You can start a conversation right now. No name, no email, no account. When you close the tab, there is no record that it happened. That is the point.
no signup · no email · no account · no trace