This Isn't Goodbye, SparkFriends--It's A New Beginning

SparkPeople began with hope. Hope that a community of like-minded, strong and driven people could motivate one another toward personal growth and overall happiness. Hope for a healthier way of life away from frustrating fad diets and extreme exercise routines. Since 2001, SparkPeople has stayed true to its original mission, offering hope, guidance and inspiration to more than 25 million people through its free goal-setting and weight-loss platform. Watching SparkPeople's members achieve amazing goals, manifest and live the lives they deserve, and cheer on people around the world has been nothing short of incredible. Before anything else is said, we want to thank you for inviting us to be a part of your journey and for the privilege of earning your support and enthusiasm for the brand. We feel confident in saying that no other brand has a community or members that live as passionately as ours! 

Now, it's time for something new. On August 17, 2021, we will be closing down SparkPeople along with its features and mobile apps to make way for a new platform, whose foundation is similarly rooted in the values that made SparkPeople so successful for two decades. As many of you know, SparkPeople's business model has always been free and was driven by advertiser support, a model that became difficult to maintain in recent years. With many larger technology companies emerging in the health and fitness space, we struggled to compete for the same advertising dollars that would keep the site online and alive since it costs many millions of dollars per year to run SparkPeople. In seeking solutions, we discovered that, while our mission remained the same, our approach needed an upgrade.

SparkFriends, we'd like to introduce you to SparkAmerica, a new and free platform we hope you will join to help spread the spark to even more people! SparkAmerica is a national movement and fitness challenge, where you can compete with cities across the nation, work toward your personal growth and even win prizes! The ad-free site will also include a nutrition and fitness tracker, challenges, articles and recipes, along with many other features we are working to develop (including a new community we hope will be as robust as the one you helped create with SparkPeople!). While many of these features are still in the very early stages and are not available yet, we're confident that you'll find the motivation you need to continue on your health journey. 

SparkAmerica is part of our new business model, in which we work with companies and organizations to help keep their employees healthy. Not only does this business model allow us to expand our health offerings to more people, but it also does a much better job of paying the bills and will likely allow us to hire more people over time to keep improving our tech platform. You will see us mention companies a good amount on SparkAmerica. We want to make it clear that SparkAmerica is 100 percent free for individuals to use, and is even free for your company to use! We provide a variety of valuable customization options and other services for companies that pay us, which is how we're able to offer the base tech platform for free. We’re very excited that we can open up our website and app for this business, keeping it free to all individuals and organizations in the United States to keep helping many people.

One feature we can't wait to share with you is SparkCoach, a revolutionary program developed by our team of health and behavior change experts that helps members stay accountable to all their nutrition, fitness, mental health and professional goals. SparkCoach can either be complementary to food tracking or possibly even replace food tracking for many people. At this time, due to various rules and regulations, SparkAmerica is only available to people based in the United States. You can check out more about SparkAmerica and join the movement, by clicking here. This is the only link you should use to sign up for SparkAmerica; please do not go through Spark360 or the app. Please note, you don’t have to choose a city to join. If you want to wait to select a city, we’ll be growing our list to 70 cities by the end of this week. 

As we begin this exciting transition, we know you will have as many questions about your accounts as you do feelings about the shutdown, so we wanted to cover a few points: 

  1. At the bottom of your nutrition and fitness trackers page, you'll find a new feature that will allow you to download daily nutrition summaries, as well as fitness and weights tracked
  2. Unfortunately, other items including recipes and blogs cannot be saved. If you want to hold on to either for future reference or use, we recommend using the "Print to PDF" option to print at home. 
  3. Premium members will no longer be charged. As a thank you for your loyalty, though, you will still have access to premium content through August 17!
  4. (updated June 9) SparkAmerica will launch its nutrition tracker on August 15! 

Lastly, we recognize that SparkPeople's passionate community is one of its most treasured assets, and we want to ensure that you continue to support and uplift each other even after SparkPeople goes offline. In an effort to continue to foster this community, we will be creating a "SparkPeople Alumni" Facebook group! You can click on this link to join your fellow SparkPeople friends: Click here! We will be approaching some SparkPeople members who embody the brand and what it means to be a positive leader to help lead this group, and we hope it becomes a space for you to share your wins, find inspiration on your off days and celebrate all that it means to be living healthy!  This group will be a "bridge" as we work to build community features on SparkAmerica. If you have any more questions, we encourage you to reach out to us at support@sparkpeople.com

While SparkPeople will no longer be online, we are confident that you, our first SparkFriends, will continue to work for the betterment of yourselves and those around you, spreading hope and inspiring others every step of the way, just as you've done for the last 20 years! We hope to see each and every one of you working toward your goals over at SparkAmerica! This isn't goodbye, but a simple see you later and thank you. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.