What was reported

In July 2026, Bloomberg and TechCrunch reported that the AI lab Midjourney had acquired Co-Star, with the deal having closed the previous spring. Co-Star's team of around two dozen people joined Midjourney, which is building its first standalone consumer apps. Terms were not disclosed. Co-Star has roughly 4.3 million monthly active users.

Midjourney has been public about wanting to expand past image generation, having historically operated mostly through Discord rather than its own apps. Buying a consumer product team with a shipped app and several million monthly users is a fairly legible way to do that.

What has not changed

Being precise here matters more than being dramatic. As things stand: Co-Star is still running. It is still free with paid features. There has been no announced change to its privacy policy, its data handling, or how horoscopes are written. Nobody has said your chart data is going anywhere.

Plenty of coverage has implied more than that. It is worth not repeating it.

What is genuinely unresolved

The honest uncertainties, which are ordinary for any acquisition:

• •Product direction. Co-Star's team is now working inside a company building new consumer apps. Where that leaves Co-Star itself is not something either company has spelled out.
• •The writing. Co-Star's daily prompts have used a mix of AI and human writing. Whether that mix shifts under an AI lab is an open question, and if the voice is why you use it, that is the thing to watch.
• •Data policy. Policies can be revised after a deal closes. Nothing has been announced. The practical response is to check the policy yourself now and again later, rather than assume in either direction.

How to decide whether to leave

A reasonable way to think about it, without catastrophising:

Stay if you use Co-Star mainly for the friend charts and the daily one-liner. That combination is unmatched, and no announced change has actually affected it yet.

Leave if the acquisition crystallised something you already half-knew: that you have given several years of daily attention and your exact birth time to an app that gives you nothing durable back. That is a good reason to move, and it was a good reason before July.

Where people are going

We keep a fuller ranked list on our Co-Star alternatives page, and a trait-by-trait breakdown at apps like Co-Star. The short version: CHANI for the best astrological writing, The Pattern for depth and relationships, and Artemis if you want an app that keeps your history instead of a feed: astrology and tarot together, a journal that remembers what you pulled, a check-in weeks later asking how it went, and Your world, where the people and worries you write about each get their own page built from your own words, with today's sky read against their chart and yours. If what you are really losing is an app that knew the people in your life, that is the closest thing to it.