Ethics & Trust

1. We will never fake you

We do not use AI to clone your voice, generate messages in your style, or build a chatbot that speaks as you — not now, and not as a future upsell. Everything delivered in your name is something you actually wrote or recorded.

This is a deliberate line. A synthetic version of someone who has died can say things they never said, to people who cannot tell the difference. We think that causes harm to grieving people, and we would rather not be in that business. When your family hears your voice here, it is because you spoke.

2. Your words are yours

• Message content is encrypted and stored under your account.
• We do not sell your data, and we do not use your messages to train AI models.
• We do not read your messages except where strictly required to operate or debug the service, or where the law requires it.
• You can export or permanently delete everything at any time from Settings — see our Privacy Policy for your full GDPR/CCPA rights.

3. The people you write to have a say

Recipients confirm their address before we schedule anything to them, and every message we send includes a way to opt out. Nobody is enrolled into receiving messages from us without their agreement, and anyone who opts out stays opted out — including for messages scheduled long in advance.

4. What happens if we shut down

We are a small company. It would be dishonest to promise a hundred-year guarantee from an organisation that may not outlive its founders, so we do not make that promise. What we commit to instead:

• If we wind down, we will give advance notice and a window to export everything you have stored.
• We deliberately do not sell a “lifetime, pay once” plan, because it would be selling a guarantee we cannot honour.
• Your media is stored so that it does not depend on a third-party cloud account staying alive after you are gone.
• We keep an export path open at all times — your legacy should never be trapped inside one company.

For the formal limits of our liability, read the Terms of Service. This page is our intent; the Terms are the contract.

5. And if we shut down after you have died

This is the hardest question anyone can ask us, and most companies in this space quietly avoid it. Notice periods and export buttons assume someone is alive to read the email and click the button. If you have already died, you can do neither — and by design, the people you wrote to usually don’t know the messages exist. Handled badly, your words would simply vanish and nobody would ever learn they were there.

So we commit to two things, in this order:

• Someone is told your messages exist. When a passing is confirmed, we notify your Legacy Keeper and emergency contacts that you left scheduled messages, how many, and roughly when they are due — without revealing a single word of the content. The messages stay sealed until their date. This means a living person knows to come looking, even if we are gone. You can switch this off in Settings if you would rather nobody knew in advance.
• If we wind down, undelivered messages are sent early, not deleted. Every pending message for someone who has died is delivered before we close, with a short note explaining it arrived earlier than intended because the service is shutting down. Arriving early is imperfect. Never arriving is unforgivable.

We would rather tell you this plainly than let you assume a small company can outlive everyone who uses it. What we can promise is that your words will not disappear quietly.

6. If your subscription lapses after you die

A card expiring is not consent to delete someone’s last words. If your account is in good standing when a passing is confirmed, your scheduled legacy messages are locked in for delivery regardless of later billing. We also keep running check-ins for a grace period after a payment failure, precisely because a failed payment is sometimes the first sign that something has happened.

7. No dark patterns

• No streaks, no guilt, no “you haven’t written in 3 days”. Our writing prompt changes weekly and asks nothing of you.
• Reminder emails are optional and switchable off in Settings.
• Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you paid for, and is done in the app — no retention maze, no phone call.
• We do not use fear of death as a sales tactic. This is a product about love.

8. The alive-check is not surveillance

We check in on a schedule you choose, and you can pause it (travel, hospital) at any time. Emergency contacts are only involved after repeated missed check-ins, and legacy delivery requires confirmation — never a single missed email. We do not track your location or monitor your activity to infer whether you are alive.

Hold us to this

If we ever fall short of what is written here, tell us: legal@soulboundstories.com. If this page and the product ever disagree, the product is the bug.