Lasting review, 2026: the curriculum is still good, the app is coasting
The two facts that decide this review: Lasting's relationship-education curriculum, built on research including John Gottman's, remains genuinely good material, and its iOS app has shipped no update since February 19, 2025. Commonly cited pricing is $29.99 a month, with in-app tiers running $11.99 to $89.99 depending on plan and duration. Whether Lasting is worth it in 2026 comes down to whether you are buying the curriculum, which holds up, or a living product, which the update history says you are not getting. Disclosure before anything else: we make HeartWeave, a product in the adjacent lane, and this review will tell you plainly when Lasting or something cheaper is the better buy. Every claim here is dated and checkable, and everything below was verified live on 2026-07-29.
What is Lasting, and who owns it?
Lasting is a self-guided relationship-education program delivered as an app: sessions, exercises, and progress tracking, translated from established research into plain-language coursework. Talkspace acquired it in November 2020 to be the self-serve end of its therapy business. The site today still carries a Talkspace line in its footer, and the copyright year in that footer is worth reading twice: "©2022 Lasting, a Talkspace company." Lasting's own research page names Gottman as central to its approach, alongside Sue Johnson's emotionally focused therapy, and puts an exact number on the foundation: "we used 126 different research studies conducted by 202 different researchers in the creation of our app-based program." The pedigree is real, and it is the best thing about the product.
Is the Lasting app still being updated?
No, and this is the load-bearing fact of the review. Checked live on 2026-07-29, the last iOS update is version 3.2.30, released February 19, 2025, from developer Groop Internet Platform inc. That silence does not delete the curriculum, but a subscription buys two things, content and a team still building, and the version history says you are only getting one of them. The footer's frozen "©2022" points the same direction. We wrote the general version of this rule in the honest guide to AI couples apps: before subscribing to anything in this category, check the current listing for signs of life dated within the last few months. Run that check on Lasting yourself before you pay; if an update has shipped since this page's date, the picture improves and we will have updated this review in our quarterly sweep.
What does Lasting do well?
Honest credit, specifically. The Gottman-informed material on attachment, repair attempts, and bids for connection is worth learning for almost any couple, and Lasting packages it more digestibly than the books do for people who will not read the books. The session structure gives couples shared vocabulary, which is a real and underrated gift: naming "that was a failed repair attempt" mid-week is worth more than most app features. And the price of admission is a fraction of one therapy session.
Where does Lasting fall short in 2026?
Four places, in rising order of importance.
The maintenance question, covered above: no app update since February 19, 2025 is information about what you are buying.
A curriculum teaches the general case. It cannot hear your Tuesday fight, does not know your particular loop, and offers no help live in the moment when a conversation goes sideways. This is a category limit, not a Lasting flaw, but buyers should know which category they are in.
It is built for two willing partners. If your partner will not do relationship coursework, and coursework is the one relationship-app format most refused partners refuse hardest, Lasting has no answer. The tools that start with one partner are a different category.
No private processing space. Everything in Lasting happens in the shared frame of the course. The thing many struggling couples need first, somewhere to work out what they actually feel before saying it, is not on the syllabus.
What should you buy instead of Lasting?
Depends on which slice of Lasting you wanted.
The education, cheapest: a Gottman book. $20 at publisher list price, once, and the source material is better than any app adaptation of it. Genuinely the best value in the entire couples-help economy.
The education, with human help: OurRitual pairs licensed relationship experts with structured content, with published pricing from $60 per week for couples on a three-month plan, billed $720 every 12 weeks (verified 2026-07-29). A different budget class; a much heavier instrument.
The daily habit instead of the course: Paired, $14.99 a month, actively developed, with a 2025 peer-reviewed evaluation in JMIR mHealth uHealth. Read that evidence with its disclosure attached: the paper reports that an author completed a secondment as Chief Relationships Officer at Paired and that Better Half/Paired provided funding, and it concludes the app "has the potential to improve relationship quality" rather than proving it does. The full three-way comparison, Paired vs Lasting vs HeartWeave, covers this fork in detail, and the wider alternatives shelf prices everything.
Help with actual conflict: this is our lane, so discount accordingly. HeartWeave is not a curriculum: each partner gets a fully private room with a companion that listens, and the couple gets a shared space with a mediator that never takes sides. What you say in your private room is never shown to your partner. The private room is free to start, no card, 15 messages a day; activating is $99 per person per month, one partner can start alone, web signups carry a 30-day money-back guarantee, and it is not therapy.
Clinical help: if what is wrong needs a clinician, no app wins. The full cost breakdown including real therapy is the honest place to budget from.
Who this review is not for
If you already own Lasting and are mid-curriculum, finish it; the material is good and sunk cost cuts both ways. If there is violence, fear, or control in your relationship, no course and no app is the tool: in the US, call or text 988, or reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at thehotline.org. Elsewhere, findahelpline.com lists local services.
Questions people ask
Is Lasting worth it in 2026?
If you want Gottman-informed coursework in app form and your partner will do it with you: the content still earns its price against one therapy session. If you are choosing a product to live inside for months, the update silence since February 19, 2025 should weigh heavily, and Paired (for habit) or a book (for theory) are the safer buys.
How much does Lasting cost?
The commonly cited price is $29.99 a month, and "commonly cited" is doing real work in that sentence: getlasting.com publishes no price page, so there is no canonical published number to quote. The in-app purchase tiers are exact and run from $11.99 to $89.99 across plan types and durations (verified 2026-07-29). Check the live listing at purchase time; subscription products in this category reprice often.
Is Lasting owned by Talkspace?
Yes, since November 2020. Lasting operates as the self-guided end of Talkspace's business, which also explains its trajectory: the curriculum was the asset, and heavy ongoing app investment was never the point.
Is Lasting based on the Gottman Method?
Lasting's research page calls Dr. John Gottman "the nation's foremost marriage researcher" and builds its first core principle on his work ("Emotional Connection is the foundation of a healthy marriage"), alongside Dr. Sue Johnson, who created emotionally focused therapy. It is Gottman-informed coursework rather than an official Gottman Institute product, and that distinction is checkable: the Gottman Institute's own apps page lists only Gottman Card Decks and Gottman Connect, with no Lasting partnership named anywhere (verified 2026-07-29). The Institute's own materials and Gottman-trained therapists are the direct routes to the method itself.
What happened to the Lasting app?
Nothing dramatic, which is the point: it did not shut down, it stopped moving. The site is live and subscriptions work, but the app's last update shipped on February 19, 2025, and the site footer still reads "©2022." In this category the quiet fade is far more common than the public shutdown, and it is the pattern to check for before buying anything, including us.
If you got here because the coursework is not touching the actual fights, the missing room is the private one. You can open it tonight, alone, at HeartWeave. Free to start, no card. Activating is $99 per person per month, with a 30-day money-back guarantee on web signup.