Terms of service

You record messages — video, audio, photographs, letters — and tell us who should receive each one and when. We store them. When you die and your executor proves it to us, we send them.

That is the whole service. We are not lawyers, we do not write or witness wills, and we do not give legal, financial or medical advice.

We keep delivering after you die for a length of time that depends on your plan, because after you die there is no further payment and everything is funded from what you already gave us.

• Month to month: 10 years after your death, and messages may be dated up to 10 years ahead.
• A year at a time: 15 years after your death, and messages may be dated up to 15 years ahead.
• Three years at a time: 25 years after your death, and messages may be dated up to 25 years ahead.
• For as long as it takes: 40 years after your death, and messages may be dated up to 40 years ahead.

The software will not let you schedule a message beyond what your plan promises to deliver. We would rather refuse than accept a message we have not funded.

When a death is reported, a person at Lasting Love Records reads the certificate against the account and decides. That review is done by a human being on purpose, and it costs real money every time.

• Month to month: a one-time $49 release fee, payable by the estate when the messages are released.
• A year at a time: no release fee. It is already covered by what you paid.
• Three years at a time: no release fee. It is already covered by what you paid.
• For as long as it takes: no release fee. It is already covered by what you paid.

This fee is never a condition of delivery. If it is not paid, is refused, is disputed, or there is nobody left to pay it, the messages are released exactly the same and at exactly the same time. We will not hold a family’s final messages over money, and the software is built so that we could not do it by accident: the release is scheduled before the fee is even calculated, and the database refuses to move a release date once it is set.

If Lasting Love Records ceases trading, every account is exported in full and sent to the account holder and their named executors before any other creditor, shareholder or member is paid anything. The cost of doing so is treated as a first-priority obligation of the company.

The export contains your files, your schedule with real dates already worked out, your recipients and their contact details, and a plain-English explanation of how to deliver them by hand. It is designed so that somebody can honour your wishes without us and without any software.

You can take exactly that export at any time, for any reason, from your account page. We will never charge for it or make you ask.

You name a primary executor and a backup. Each sets their own access code, which we store only as a scramble. They cannot read, watch or listen to anything you have recorded, and they cannot see who you have written to. Their only power is to tell us you have died.

To unlock, your executor uploads a death certificate. Then:

1. A person at our end reviews it against the name, date of birth and address on your account. This is never decided by software alone.
2. If it contradicts your account, it is rejected and we telephone them.
3. If it matches, we email you and wait 24 hours. If you are alive to read that email, one click stops everything.
4. Your first message is then sent, and the rest follow a day later.
5. If your primary executor does nothing for 30 days, your backup is invited automatically.

Once a message has been sent it cannot be recalled by anyone, including us. There is no such function in our software. If a message is sent because a certificate was forged or mistaken, we will tell you immediately and help however we can, but we cannot take it back.

We do not delete your messages because a payment failed. A card most often stops working because its holder is seriously ill or has just died, which is the exact moment this service matters most.

If payment fails you can no longer add new recordings, but you keep everything already stored, you can still change your schedule, and everything already scheduled is still delivered. We will contact you, and keep your account for at least 90 days before anything is at risk. We will never delete a vault without telling both you and your executors first.

Your files are encrypted, access-controlled and audited. They are not end-to-end encrypted, and we will never say they are.

End-to-end encryption means only you hold the key — and you will be dead at exactly the moment the key is needed. Somebody has to be able to open these files without you, which means we hold the keys, which means you are trusting us rather than being protected by mathematics. Any service in this category claiming otherwise is either wrong or cannot deliver after your death.

Nothing unlawful, and nothing intended to harass, threaten or defraud the person receiving it. We do not read your messages looking for it. We will act on a credible report, which may mean opening the message the report is about — under section 8 — and we will comply with a valid court order.

You own everything you upload. You grant us only the permission needed to store it and to deliver it to the people you chose. We do not use it to train anything, we do not sell it, we do not analyse it for advertising, and we do not read it as a matter of course.

We can open a message, and we will not pretend otherwise. It happens where you ask us to, where a court requires it, or where we are investigating something that cannot be resolved any other way. In every case a member of staff types a reason before anything is shown to them, and their name, the time and that reason are written to a record that nobody here can edit or delete. You can read that record yourself, at any time, in your account.

You can delete your account at any time. Messages already delivered cannot be unsent, and our record that a delivery happened is kept — it holds no message content, and it exists because it is the only defence if a release is ever disputed.

We will do what we say here. We cannot guarantee that a recipient’s email provider will accept a message, that an address will still exist in thirty years, or that a person will still be alive to receive it. Where a delivery fails we retry, and then we ask your executor for a current address.

Our liability is limited to what you have paid us, except where the law does not allow that limit.

We will email you before changing these terms in a way that reduces what we have promised you. The commitments in sections 3, 4 and 5 will not be reduced for any account created before the change.