The digital legacy graveyard: five services that promised forever
End-of-life planning services make an unusual promise: that they will still be there, working, on a day that might be thirty years away, for a grieving stranger who has never used them. It is worth looking at how that promise has held up.
Lantern offered end-of-life planning checklists and document storage. When it retired the service, users were given a support contact and a deadline to extract their own plans. The people who had done the responsible thing, in the responsible place, got homework and a countdown.
Deathswitch was an early dead man’s switch: it emailed your secrets to chosen people if you stopped responding to prompts. The service that existed to outlive its users did not outlive its decade.
Legacy Locker was one of the first digital-estate vaults, storing credentials and last wishes. It was acquired in 2013 and the product no longer exists.
Beyond was a UK funeral and estate comparison service. Its domain now serves another company’s content, which is its own kind of epitaph.
Farewill is the gentler case: the UK online will-writer was sold to Dignity in 2024. Customers’ documents moved with the business. An acquisition is an ownership change, not a shutdown, and it is fair to say so. It is also a reminder that the company holding your family’s plans can become a different company without asking you.
The American vaults Everplans and Cake have both been acquired too, and both now sit inside the funeral-services sector. Again: ownership changes, stated as such. The pattern is not that these companies were bad. Most were thoughtful products run by people who cared. The pattern is structural: a hosted service is a bet that a company outlives you, keeps its terms, and keeps its door open, and in this category that bet keeps losing.
What to do instead
The uncomfortable conclusion is not “avoid planning tools”. It is: keep the record your family will need in a form that has no company in it.
- Paper survives every acquisition. A printed letter of instruction with the will beats a vault nobody can open.
- Files survive too, if they are in open formats. A plain text register outlives any app that could have displayed it.
- If it is sensitive, encrypt it with standard, open tools rather than a service’s proprietary lock.
That is the design brief Executor File was built to: a plain text register, encrypted with standard open tools, its key split across three printed shares, with one printed page telling your executor how to open it. No account, no server, no company that can be acquired, retire, or send your family a deadline. The full argument, with the sourced version of this list, is here.