Most digital estate planning tools make your family prove something terrible happened — produce a death certificate, file a report, wait for a review. Trusted Directive is built to work the other way around: you’ll pre-authorize who gets access, and if you go silent when it matters, the vault is designed to open exactly the way you decided in advance. No paperwork at the worst possible moment. (The protocol is in development for alpha.)
A stroke. A sudden dementia diagnosis. A car accident that leaves you in the ICU. Your family needs the healthcare proxy and power of attorney that day — and there is no death certificate, because you’re alive.
You did the responsible thing: the POA is signed, the advance directive is notarized, the proxy is named. But signed documents sitting in a drawer, a safe, or an attorney’s office can’t be reached at 2 a.m. from a hospital waiting room.
Typical emergency-access models are reactive: someone reports a death, uploads a certificate, and waits for a manual review. For incapacity — where no certificate will ever exist — that model has no answer at all.
We don’t think a software company should decide whether your family’s crisis is “real enough.” Trusted Directive never judges death or incapacity — it enforces the instructions you set while you were well.
One rule, set entirely by you: if someone you trust asks for access and you stay silent, your instructions will execute. If you’re fine, one tap stops everything. Here’s how it’s designed to work — a capability we’re building for alpha.
The verify-silence protocol
We verify silence, not death certificates — so it works for incapacity too, not just death.
Choose your Trusted Contacts — family, your executor, your healthcare proxy. Decide exactly which documents each person may reach, and set the silence window that must pass before anything releases. All of it is revocable and editable any time.
After a life event — a death, a hospitalization, a diagnosis — a Trusted Contact requests the access you pre-authorized. No death certificate, no notarized affidavit, no support ticket asking your family to document their worst week.
Trusted Directive will immediately alert you through every channel you’ve registered. If it’s a false alarm, you respond with one tap and the request ends there. This is the verification step — we verify silence, not paperwork.
If your silence window passes with no response, the requested access will release — only the documents you designated, only to the person you named. Because the trigger is your silence, it will work for incapacity just as well as death.
Trusted Directive never decides whether someone has died or lost capacity. The protocol has no opinion — it has your instructions. Read more about the controls behind it on the security page.
Some moments can’t wait out a silence window. For those, you’ll be able to build an Emergency Medical Packet — a small set of documents you designate for instant release to the Trusted Contacts you name, with no request and no delay. This is a capability we’re building for alpha.
You’ll authorize it in advance, while you’re well. When your daughter is standing in a hospital corridor being asked about your wishes, she’ll open it on her phone.
You choose the contents and the recipients. Trusted Directive doesn’t adjudicate whether an emergency has occurred — the packet is released by you, in advance. (In development for alpha.)
Storing files is the easy part — plenty of tools do it. The harder question is the one families discover too late: what isn’t in there?
As you upload, the vault recognizes what each document is — will, trust, power of attorney, healthcare directive, deed, policy — and files it against the categories a complete estate actually needs.
Documents are automatically classified into 18 categories today. Gap alerts that surface a missing or expiring item — no current healthcare directive, an insurance policy approaching lapse, an estate plan untouched in years — are rolling out during alpha, so the gap gets closed now, not discovered by your executor.
If a financial advisor or estate attorney invited you, they see metadata only — category, dates, and (rolling out during alpha) gap alerts. Never the documents, never the file names. They get a reason to help; your privacy stays intact. How advisors use it →
Without instructions, most online accounts simply go dark: banks freeze access, email providers lock out your family, subscriptions keep billing, and accounts your family never knew existed stay unfound. Executors routinely uncover assets months later — some are never found at all.
Paperless billing and autopay quietly removed the paper trail families used to follow. There are no statements in the mailbox, no checkbook ledger — just logins nobody has and inboxes nobody can open. That’s why the account inventory in your vault matters as much as the will itself: it’s the map to everything else.
Trusted Directive holds that map — your accounts, policies, and critical documents — and the Verify-Silence Release Protocol we’re building for alpha is designed to hand it to the right person at the right moment. For the full picture, read what happens to your accounts when you die.
Trusted Directive operates as an “online tool” under RUFADAA — the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, adopted in most U.S. states. In plain English: the law recognizes the instructions you set here, and they take precedence over a fiduciary’s default rights.
RUFADAA was written for exactly this problem — who may access a person’s digital accounts and records after death or incapacity. It gives top priority to directions a person sets through an online tool, ahead of generic terms-of-service defaults. When you configure your Trusted Contacts, your Emergency Medical Packet, and your silence protocol — the account types and protocol we’re building for alpha — you’re not making an informal wish list; you’re leaving directions within a defined legal framework. That recognition applies to the documents and records stored in your Trusted Directive vault — not a blanket authority over every third-party account you hold. Many platforms simply ignore that framework; we built to it.
This is a plain-English description of how Trusted Directive is positioned, not legal advice. For your specific situation, ask your estate attorney — and if they have questions, we’d love to talk to them.
$120 for the first year, starting with a 30-day free trial. $60 a year after that — we say it here, before you ever reach a checkout page. Trusted Contacts will be free, view-only, always (in development for alpha). And your documents are never held hostage: cancel any time; one-click export is in development for alpha.
Full vault and document classification today; the Verify-Silence protocol and Emergency Medical Packet in development for alpha. First 30 days free.
The renewal price, stated upfront — because surprise renewals are how this category lost people’s trust.
Family, proxies, and executors will join view-only at no cost — they see what you share, nothing more. In development for alpha.
Trusted Directive opens to a small first group soon. Join the waitlist and your invite lands the day we do.
Join the waitlist — your invite lands the day we open.