An anticipated, but sad announcement about Avocado

After a long introspective period and several attempts at survival for the service, I have to sadly announce that Avocado will close its doors.

It has been a considerable joy and privilege to help make an app that’s been useful for so many people. While I still feel the inspiration to make something to support relationships with technology, the financial and market realities in this space are tough to surmount. Over the years a wonderful team put in hard work toward sustainability but…we couldn’t overcome those challenges.

This is going to be toughest on folks who used Avocado daily to help support their lives, but thankfully there are options out there that come close to replicating this service and may have enough financial backing to continue. Try any of these?

• Between is pretty great but doesn’t appear to sync with Google Calendar. Definitely check it out.
• There’s Couple.me which is owned by Life360. Like Avocado, updates have been spotty but at least it still exists and has many similar features.
• Maybe try Slack? While not built expressly for personal use, it has the ability to add integrations that could replicate much of what Avocado offered.

It’s really hard to say goodbye to an idea and effort that didn’t work out. Saying goodbye hurts of course, but what hurts more has been a recent decline in providing great customer support. Some of this was due to the professional realities of managing a complex and difficult app without sufficient resources, some was personal. Users and customers always deserve better, and it’s up to us as product makers to set a high bar for service. Please accept my personal apology for that, I’ll carry that lesson through to every future effort.

I’m personally grateful to the staff, advisors, and investors who helped build something useful from scratch whose outcome wasn’t certain but whose aim was to bring people closer together. We all loved this idea.

To Avocado users: things will keep running until Feb 28, 2017 to minimize disruption. And we have an export feature you can use to get all your data in a format that allows you to easily read and search it without needing the app anymore.

If you’re an Avocado user, you can easily export your data by…

• Going to the settings page of the web app and
• Clicking on the either the “Start exporting our stuff” link or the “Download” link in the Request your archive section.

For a brief time we were able to be a part of an uncommonly emotional but commonly human service, using everyday technology. It’s been an honor to be a part of that and a part of so many great relationships. To our users, investors, and all the Avocados: thank you all so much.

Take care and be well together,
Chris Wetherell
for Avocado Software