Digital Legacy Apps: What They Do and How to Choose

"Digital legacy app" is one phrase covering four different products. One hands over your passwords. One builds a page where people remember you. One delivers your own words to the people you name. One builds something that keeps talking after you're gone. They don't substitute for each other, and buying on the phrase instead of the job means finding out months later.

Your digital legacy is the part of what you leave behind that has no physical form. Logins. Photo libraries. A crypto wallet. Drafts you never sent. Some of it needs handing over. Some of it needs saying.

Four products, one phrase

Access

Account and password handoff

Someone needs to get in. Into your email, your wallet, the files your will already refers to. This is the biggest and most mature corner of the category, and it's an access problem.

Neither CipherWill nor GoodTrust describes delivering personal messages as its main purpose. Their job is access and paperwork.

Built for Getting into an account, a wallet, or a file your will already refers to.
CipherWill An end-to-end encrypted dead man's switch for passwords, recovery phrases, private keys and financial credentials, sealed with AES-256-GCM before it leaves your browser. It publishes its timeline: a check-in at day 3, alerts from day 30, and at day 100 of silence your beneficiaries get the decryption keys. Log in at any point and the clock resets. (Checked against cipherwill.com, August 2026.)
GoodTrust Further into estate planning. Wills, trusts and health care directives, plus a digital vault for accounts and documents you can share with family "only if something happens to you". One Estate+ plan, $149. (Checked against mygoodtrust.com, August 2026.)
Memory

Memorial and tribute pages

Somewhere for people to gather afterwards. Most products here are commemorative pages rather than message vaults, and nothing starts until a death is already known.

So somebody has to know, and somebody has to act. If what you want is a place for friends and family to leave stories and photos once everyone knows, use a memorial site.

Built for A place for friends and family to gather once a death is already known.
In Memory Of The closer case, because it's built around a "vault" where you record messages, audio or video in advance. Its release depends on a trustee you designate. That person is notified of your death, then shares the stored material with the people you named, alongside funeral details. (Checked against inmemoryofapp.com, August 2026.)
Delivery

Message delivery

Your own words, to people you name. This is what Sanctia does. Nobody has to report your death first. The trigger is your own inactivity, measured against a schedule you set.

It can carry a credential too. Lock a message with your passphrase and the key is derived on your device; nothing on our servers can open the contents, and a document attachment is encrypted the same way before it is uploaded. A recovery phrase or a keyfile is a legitimate thing to put in a Sanctia message.

What it is not is a credential manager. There is no autofill, no browser extension, and the passphrase is one you choose and hand to your recipient yourself. If day to day password management is the job, a product built for that job will do it better, and plenty of people keep credentials and last words in separate products on principle.

Built for Your own words, reaching the people you name once you stop answering, with room for a credential too.
Dead Man's Switch The long-running plain-email version of the same idea, and it describes the mechanism in its own words. The switch emails you "asking you to show that you are fine by clicking a link". If you don't answer, "all your messages will be sent 60 days after your last checkin". Its pages describe email messages. No attachments, voice or video are documented. (Checked against deadmansswitch.net, August 2026.)
Persona

An AI version of you

A fourth thing gets searched under the same phrase, and it is none of the three above. If that's what you pictured, treat it as a separate decision.

Built for An interactive persona that keeps responding, rather than a fixed set of messages or a vault of credentials.
Afterlife.ai Builds toward an interactive AI persona rather than a fixed set of messages or a vault of credentials (checked against afterlife.ai, August 2026).

What Sanctia does

Missed check-ins Delivery needs three consecutive misses by default, and you set the number. There's a 24-hour hold after the last one.
Checking in Opening the app counts as a check-in, so most people never have to think about it. Intervals run from a day to a year, and you can pause everything whenever you want.
Reminders Check-ins arrive by email to start with. Add SMS in settings, once you've verified a phone number.
Human veto A person can veto it, if you switch that on. Someone you name is asked before anything sends, and they can stop it. Adding a contact doesn't switch this on by itself.
What recipients get A link to their own private vault by default, rather than an email carrying the message body. They can't see anything before the delivery point.
Passphrase Any message can be locked with your passphrase. It never leaves your device, and nothing on our servers can open the message. That protects it from us and from anyone who breaks into our database. What it doesn't do is limit who can read the message: you pick the passphrase and you hand it over, so anyone you told it to can use it. One passphrase covers the account rather than a single message, so it opens every message you lock with it.

The web app is open to anyone today. The iPhone app comes through Apple's TestFlight, and Android is in open testing on Google Play. If you need an App Store build on iPhone right now, factor that in.

Five questions that decide it

  1. Do you need someone to get in, or do you need to be heard? Access and words are different problems. A product built for one will disappoint you at the other.
  2. Should the trigger wait for someone to confirm your death, or is silence enough? A trustee-notified vault needs a person to know and to act. An inactivity trigger works even if nobody realizes for weeks, which matters when the people you're writing to are estranged, distant, or the last to hear.
  3. Is this for you, or for the people left behind? A memorial page is built for grief that has already started. A message is built to arrive on your terms.
  4. What happens if you're unreachable and alive? Ask it of anything with an inactivity trigger. A product that fires on one missed check-in will eventually fire on a flat battery, and you cannot undo that. Get a published answer rather than a guess, and read what a false alarm actually costs.
  5. Do you want your credentials and your last words in the same product? Plenty of people keep them apart on principle, so a breach or a mistake in one never reaches the other.

Two pages here go deeper. Best Dead Man's Switch Apps in 2026, Compared puts seven products side by side on false alarms, encryption and price. How to Send a Message After You Die covers every route, including the ones that need no app at all.

If it's your own words reaching named people, that's what we built.

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