Dead man's switch services compared (2026): who actually delivers after you die

Most households quietly run on one person. One person knows the mortgage login, where the spare key is, which subscriptions renew, how to reach the accountant, and what to actually say to the children if the worst happens. If that person dies, the rest of the household is not grieving first. They are firefighting.

A whole category of tools now promises to solve this. Dead man's switches, digital estate vaults, message services with names built for the moment. Most of them get one of two things wrong: they fire on the wrong signal, or they only store your information instead of delivering it. This is an honest comparison of the main options a UK household can use in 2026, with real pricing where it is published. We build the last one on the list, so read that entry knowing our bias. The others are described as fairly as we can manage.

The quick, honest answer

Ask three questions and the field narrows fast.

• What actually triggers delivery? Most tools use an inactivity timer. If you stop clicking, they release your material. The problem is that inactivity is not death. A hospital stay or a changed email can fire it while you are alive, and if a relative keeps an account warm it never fires after you die.
• Does it store, or does it deliver? A vault holds your documents and hopes the right person finds them. Delivery means the material reaches the specific people you chose, at the right moment, without them hunting for an account they may not know exists.
• How many points of failure are there? If one nominated person, or one automated timer, is the only thing standing between your instructions and the people who need them, that is a single point of failure.

The best answer is a service that waits for the real event rather than a proxy for it, and that needs more than one person to confirm before anything moves.

The options at a glance

1. Google Inactive Account Manager

Best for: handing over your Google data if you barely use anything else.

A free setting inside your Google account. You pick a window of 3 to 18 months. If you go quiet that long, Google emails your chosen contacts a download link to selected Gmail, Drive and Photos data. It is genuinely useful and genuinely free. The catch is that it only covers Google, it fires on inactivity rather than death, and it does nothing about your bank, your password manager, or the instructions only you carry in your head.

2. Dead Man's Switch

Best for: a single, low-stakes email you want sent if you stop replying.

A bare-bones service. You write messages, set a check-in interval, and if you miss the email prompts it sends your material to your recipients. Free for one recipient, or around $20 a year for more. It is cheap and simple, and that is also the problem: miss a couple of check-ins because they landed in spam or you were travelling, and it fires while you are perfectly fine. One inbox, no verification, no fallback.

3. GoodTrust

Best for: US households wanting estate documents and digital handover in one place.

A broader platform combining wills, directives and a digital vault, with delivery driven by an inactivity-style check. Around $149 a year. It does more than the simple switches, but it still leans on a single automated signal to decide you have died, with no independent human confirmation, and its legal features are shaped for the US rather than the UK.

4. Everplans

Best for: organising everything in one tidy place while you are alive.

A digital vault for documents, account details and wishes, with trusted people you grant view access. Free for a few items, or $99.99 a year for the full product. It is one of the better-organised tools in the category. But it stores and shares rather than delivers, there is no automated confirmation that you have died, and it depends on your deputies acting correctly. It is also built around US estates.

5. MyWishes and DeadSocial

Best for: UK households wanting free tools to write wishes and pre-written messages.

A free UK platform, with the older DeadSocial folded into it. You can write final messages and name digital executors who agree, in a non-binding arrangement, to release them. Free is a real advantage. The weakness is structural: everything rests on one nominated person who might forget, decline, lose access, or die first, and nobody independently confirms the death. One person is the whole mechanism.

6. Afternote and Once I've Gone

Best for: writing your wishes and storing account information for family to find.

Both are free UK-friendly services for recording wishes, storing account details and leaving messages, handed over to family after you die. They are pleasant to use and cost nothing. But the handover is manual and family-initiated, which means it depends on your relatives knowing the account exists and being able to get in. Storage, not delivery, and no verification step.

7. Clocr, and the SafeBeyond warning

Best for: organising digital assets for named beneficiaries.

A US digital-estate platform with a free tier and paid options up to around $149.99 one-time. It safeguards files and names beneficiaries, but it is a vault model with no verified-death gate. Worth remembering here: SafeBeyond, a similar service, shut down in 2022, and everything entrusted to it went with it. A vault is only ever as durable as the company holding it, which is a real risk when the whole point is that it has to work years from now.

8. Farewill and Life Ledger

Best for: writing a will, and closing accounts after a death.

These solve adjacent problems, and solve them well. Farewill writes online wills from £100 and handles probate. Life Ledger lets a family notify hundreds of banks and companies after a death, for free. Neither delivers your chosen messages or your access instructions to the specific people you picked. A will says who inherits. It does not tell your partner which app pays the nursery, or where the spare key is. That gap is exactly what a delivery service exists to close.

9. If You Die

Best for: making sure the right access and instructions reach the specific people you chose, only after you have actually died.

Here is our bias, stated plainly. If You Die is a delivery service, not a vault. You write messages and instructions for the people you choose. We hold them, and we deliver them, but only once we are confident you have died. That confidence is the entire product.

The mechanism is built to never fire by mistake. You confirm you are fine with a single tap once a month. If you go quiet, there is a patient grace period, and logging in at any point resets everything. Only after that, two independent people you nominated must separately confirm you have died. No single person can trigger a delivery, and no missed email can either. When that bar is met, we deliver secure links to the people on your list. They do not need an account, and they are never left hunting for one.

Four promises hold it together:

• We never read your words. No human and no AI analyses what you write.
• Two humans must confirm. Verified death, not an inactivity guess, and never a single point of failure.
• We never sell your data. Not now, not later.
• We never assume your beliefs. The words are yours, delivered as you meant them.

Price: a free tier to start with one message to one person, then Personal at £6/month, or £60/year, and Family at £18/month for five accounts in one household, each fully private. There is a Founding member option at £490 once, forever. Multi-currency, 14-day money-back, cancel any time. The Family plan covers a whole household, and the full breakdown is on the pricing page.

The honest caveat: we do not write your messages for you, and we do not decide who should receive them. That is your work, and it takes about ten minutes to start. What we guarantee is the part you cannot do yourself: waiting for the real event, confirming it properly, and delivering what you left to exactly the people you chose. Ten minutes today, one tap a month, and the household stops running on a single point of failure.

What to look for

• A real trigger, not a proxy. Inactivity and calendar dates are guesses. Confirmed death is the event that actually matters.
• More than one person in the loop. If a single executor or a single timer is the whole mechanism, it can fail silently or fire wrongly.
• Delivery, not just storage. Holding your information is not the same as getting it to the right people at the right moment.
• A clear privacy promise. The service should never read, sell, or train on what you write.
• A stated plan if the company stops. Ask what happens to your material if the provider closes. Durability is the whole point.

FAQ

Why not just use a free inactivity switch?

Because inactivity is not death. Free switches fire when you miss a check-in, which can happen while you are alive, and they fail to fire if someone keeps your account active after you die. A verified-death service waits for the real event and needs two people to confirm it.

Is this the same as a will?

No, and it does not replace one. A will decides who inherits your assets through a legal process. A delivery service makes sure the practical things, the messages, the access, the instructions, reach the specific people you chose. Most households need both.

What stops it delivering while I am alive?

Several gates. A monthly one-tap check-in, a patient grace period, and the fact that logging in resets everything. On top of that, two independent people must separately confirm your death before anything is delivered. Firing by mistake is the one thing the whole design is built to prevent.

Can a whole family use one plan?

Yes. The Family plan covers five accounts in one household, each fully private from the others. See the Family plan for details.

Ten minutes today, one tap a month

If your household quietly runs on you, this is worth ten minutes. Start free with one message to one person, see how the verified delivery works, and check the pricing when you are ready. Trust is the product, and it starts with a single tap.