Leaving AppClose? Export Your Records First

If you have been using AppClose to keep track of your co-parenting — exchanges, messages, expenses — and you are thinking about leaving, there is one thing to do before anything else: get your records out.

AppClose ran free for about a decade. That ended on 1 January 2026, when the app moved to a paid subscription. A lot of parents who had years of history in it suddenly had to decide whether to pay to keep using it. This guide is about protecting what you already put in, whichever way you decide.

Why export before you cancel, not after

This is the part people get wrong, and it is expensive to get wrong. Access to historical records is usually tied to an active account. Once a subscription lapses or an account is closed, the door you were going to walk back through may not be there.

The order that protects you is simple:

• Export everything first, while your account is fully active.
• Open every file you exported and confirm it actually contains what you think it does.
• Store a copy somewhere that is not your phone — a computer, an external drive, wherever you keep documents you cannot lose.
• Only then cancel, downgrade, or switch.

What to ask for when you export

Menus change, so rather than send you chasing a button that may have moved, here is what matters. Look in the app's settings or account area for anything labelled export, download, records, reports, or data request, and contact their support directly if you cannot find it. Ask specifically for:

• Message history, with timestamps, covering the full date range — not just the last few months.
• Expense and payment records, including what was requested, what was approved, and what was actually reimbursed.
• Calendar and parenting-time history, including changes and who requested them.
• Any attachments — receipts and photos. These are frequently the thing that does not come through in a basic export.
• The certified or official version of any record, if the service offers one, rather than a plain screen copy.

Give yourself time. If a request has to go through support, it may take days.

Check the export before you trust it

An export that silently truncated is worse than no export, because you will not find out until you need it. Open the files and check:

• Does the oldest entry go back as far as you expect?
• Are timestamps present and readable, or did they get flattened out?
• Did attachments come along, or just filenames pointing at files you do not have?
• Is anything cut off mid-record at the end of the file?

If something is missing, you want to know now, while your account still works.

Then decide what you actually need next

This is worth a moment of honesty with yourself, because the answer determines what kind of tool you need — and the two are genuinely different products.

If the court ordered you to communicate through a specific platform, or your co-parent actively uses one and messages flow through it, you need that shared platform. That is what OurFamilyWizard, TalkingParents and AppClose are for, and no documentation app substitutes for a communication channel a judge told you to use.

If what you really need is your own record — because the other parent will not participate, or because you were the only one entering anything anyway — then a shared platform is charging you for a collaboration you are not getting. A one-sided documentation tool does that job, usually for less, and without needing anyone else's cooperation.

A useful test: look at your export. If nearly everything in it was entered by you, you were already using a two-person product as a one-person product.

Whatever you choose, keep the habit

The value was never the app. It was that you wrote things down close to when they happened, in plain factual language, and kept the receipts attached. That habit transfers anywhere — including to paper.

If you want to start today without installing anything, we publish a free printable custody log template — exchange, expense and incident sheets. No email required.