Maple was one of the good ones: a family organiser built by a team who took the invisible work of running a household seriously. It has been acquired by Wander and sunsets on December 31, 2026. Here's what to export before the deadline, and the questions worth asking before you pick what comes next.
The short version: Maple has been acquired by Wander and will sunset on December 31, 2026. Annual subscriptions have already stopped renewing; monthly plans run to the end. After the sunset date, accounts close, the connections to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook and TeamSnap are switched off, and all data is deleted with no way to recover it. Maple's own announcement and export guidance are at growmaple.com.
One evening is enough to get everything out. In order of importance:
Your calendar. If Maple was synced to Google, Apple or Outlook, those events already live in that calendar and survive the shutdown untouched. If you only ever used Maple's own calendar, export it as an ICS file and import it into the calendar you'll use next.
Your lists. Shopping lists, to-do lists, chores and shared notes exist only inside Maple. Export them before deciding where they'll live.
Your recipes and meal plans. Save the recipes your family actually cooks somewhere you control.
Anything that exists only in the family inbox. If an email matters (a booking confirmation, school information), make sure a copy lives in your own inbox too.
Maple's team helped bring the conversation about the mental load at home into the mainstream, and they built a genuinely thoughtful product around it: shared calendar, family inbox, chores, meals and lists in one place, designed so that running the household wasn't one person's job.
If your household runs on Fair Play, this decision probably sits with whoever holds the “calendar keeper” card. You're the one making the call, so it's worth a short conversation with your partner first about what you both want from the next system. Four things worth agreeing on:
Maple put both caregivers in one system, and for many families that was the whole point: no more being the only person who knew the term dates. Whatever comes next has to actually get used by both of you. The easiest way to manage that is to pick something that already works inside what you use every day, like WhatsApp or iMessage, rather than something that asks for a new app and a new habit.
Maple's family inbox was ahead of its time: forward an email in, and the whole family could see it. The catch is the word “forward”, because someone still has to notice the email and remember to send it on. That part is worth revisiting, because some systems now read the school emails directly with no forwarding at all, and the better ones go further and are proactive, raising half-term weeks before either of you would have thought about it. Decide how much you want happening without anyone doing anything, because far more is possible now than when you chose the last one.
Calendar, lists, meals, chores. The unglamorous daily surfaces are where an organiser earns its keep, and Maple covered them well. Agree on the two or three you genuinely use, then judge replacements on those. It's easy to get pulled into the extras, the star charts and the points and the badges, and end up choosing on features nobody in your house will open twice.
This is probably the most important question. A shared to-do list shows what needs doing, but someone still has to keep it up to date, notice what's missing, and make sure it gets done, and in many households that ends up being the same person every time.
Fair Play solves this differently: through ownership. Each area of responsibility (school admin, meals, birthdays, laundry, household maintenance) becomes a card with one owner who is responsible for it from start to finish: noticing it, planning it, and completing it.
That also makes rebalancing much easier. When one partner is overloaded, you can transfer an entire card instead of renegotiating dozens of individual tasks. The key question is whether a replacement system can support that kind of clear ownership and allow responsibilities to move between partners easily, or whether it is ultimately just another shared list.
Everything Maple did day to day, Hermo does too: shared calendar, lists, meals and chores. The difference is that Hermo is AI native. Created at the end of 2025, it was designed as an AI agent from the ground up, with a helpful interface wrapped around it rather than the other way around. Emails are read automatically, so events and to-dos appear before either of you has thought about them.
| Maple | Hermo | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | ✓ | ✓ |
| Shared family calendar | ✓ | ✓ |
| Shared to-do and shopping lists | ✓ | ✓ |
| Meal planning | ✓ | ✓ |
| Recurring chores and rotas | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reads the family Gmail directly, nothing to forward | ✓ | |
| Lives in WhatsApp, no new app to install | ✓ | |
| Fair Play cards board with holders and rotation | ✓ | |
| Proactive Watchers (weekends, school holidays) | ✓ |
Hermo covers most of what Maple did day to day. These four are the reasons Maple families choose it rather than setting the same thing up again somewhere else.
Maple's inbox waited for you to forward things. Hermo connects to Gmail through Google-audited OAuth and reads the senders you pick, so the 7am school newsletter becomes a calendar event and a to-do before drop-off.
Every family app faces the same quiet failure: one parent uses it faithfully, the other means to. Hermo lives in the WhatsApp your family already checks, so there is no app to install and no habit to build. Voice note it at the school gate, photograph the cookbook page, ask it what time the party ends.
Fair Play splits running a home into cards, one per area: school admin, birthdays, meals. In Hermo every card has an owner, and you choose how often ownership rotates. To-dos found in your email land on the right card by themselves, and repeating chores can live there too. The owner gets the reminders, so passing a card on passes the whole job rather than just a list. Hermo shows who owns what; it doesn't judge.
The Weekend Watcher sends three activity ideas midweek, picked for your kids' ages, your area and the weather, in time to actually plan something. The Half-term Watcher fires weeks before a term break with local club options, prices and times, and already knows what you've booked from your email. Familypedia holds the facts you tell it once, so either parent can ask instead of asking each other.
Hermo won't be right for every Maple household, so here is the field as we see it. Cozi is the free, dependable choice: shared calendar, lists and meals, used by millions, and you do all the typing yourself. FamilyWall is the long-standing option if you want most of Maple's spread in one place: calendar, lists, meals and family location, all filled in by hand.
Hermo's difference is that nothing needs forwarding. It reads the family Gmail itself, lives in WhatsApp rather than a new app, and files what it finds onto a Fair Play board both partners see. If the reason your family chose Maple was that one parent was tired of being the whole system, that's the difference that matters.
It's a fair question in 2026, and plenty of Maple families are asking it. You can wire up a capable personal setup with an AI assistant and the apps already on your phone, and for one organised adult it can work genuinely well.
The biggest bugbear is maintenance. You've bought yourself another thing to keep on top of, and when the school changes its newsletter format or an integration breaks, the person who built it is the person who fixes it, usually in the week everything else is busy.
Hermo is AI native rather than a legacy system with AI sprinkled on top, which is why it reads the family email directly instead of asking you to forward things to it. You get the latest AI capabilities, and it has already been taught to understand family context in a way general assistants haven't.
Maple sunsets on December 31, 2026, following its acquisition by Wander. Annual subscriptions have already stopped renewing; monthly subscriptions run until the shutdown date.
It is deleted, permanently. Maple has said there will be no way to recover data after December 31, 2026, so export your calendar, lists, recipes and chores before then. If your Maple calendar was synced to Google, Apple or Outlook, those events already live in that calendar and survive on their own.
Hermo goes one step further than an inbox you forward to. It connects to the family Gmail through Google-audited OAuth and reads the senders you choose, so events and to-dos appear without anyone forwarding anything.
Yes, in a different shape. A chore in Hermo is a to-do on the shared list that you set to repeat, and you can file it to a Fair Play card. Because to-dos on a card belong to whoever currently holds that card, chores move when the card rotates rather than sitting on a checklist one person has to keep managing and chasing.
No, and that's deliberate. Hermo writes events into the Google Calendar you already use and shows a shared family view in the browser, so your calendar stays yours. If you ever left Hermo, your events would still be sitting in your own Google Calendar.
There's a free plan and two paid plans, one subscription covers the whole household, and the paid plans start with a 14-day free trial. See the pricing page for what's included in each.
Hermo's Gmail access uses OAuth 2.0 reviewed and verified by Google's Trust & Safety team, and Hermo has passed the CASA security assessment by external auditor TAC Security. It does not send, reply to, or delete email; the only change it makes in your inbox is adding its own labels to emails it has processed. You choose which senders it reads.
Don't let December 31 catch you out. Connect the family Gmail, message Hermo on WhatsApp, and you'll be set up in an evening.