There is one file every family eventually needs: the one that says where the will is, which banks hold the accounts, what the insurance covers, how to get into the phone, and what you wanted. Most families do not have it. The person who died was carrying the whole map in their head.
An entire industry exists to fix this, and it made two strange choices. It put the map in the cloud — the single most sensitive document a household owns, uploaded to a startup's servers, behind a login the executor does not have. And it made the map a subscription, forever, for a document whose entire purpose is to outlast the person who wrote it. Everplans charges $99.99 a year.
Sit with the second one. Everybody eventually stops paying. When the payment stops, the plan degrades or locks — precisely at the moment it was built for. The category shipped death planning with a churn model attached.
The two questions nobody wants printed on the box
Who can read it? For every cloud organiser the honest answer is the same: their staff under policy, their acquirer after the next sale, and whoever breaches them. These companies do get acquired — the biggest name in the category has changed owners twice. The file does not move; the terms around it do.
What happens if the company dies first? Startups close constantly. When a cloud organiser sunsets, a decade of careful preparation becomes an export-before-this-date email you might not read. A shutdown should not be able to un-prepare your family.
So we built the stubborn version
In Case is a guided vault that lives on your phone. Fifteen sections of plain questions — where is the will, who holds the mortgage, what should be cancelled first. A readiness score that names your gaps. A printable emergency sheet for the drawer.
Face ID on the front, encryption underneath, and no server behind it at all: no account, no sync, nothing we could be subpoenaed, breached, or acquired out of. We cannot read your vault. We took some trouble to make sure we never can.
It costs $59, once — less than a single year of the subscription alternatives, and then it is simply yours, like the drawer it replaces. If this company vanished tomorrow your vault would keep opening, exporting and printing. That is not a feature; it is the architecture. The handover is yours too: print the sheet into a sealed envelope, leave an encrypted export with your executor, or share the passcode with one person you trust.
The quiet bet
We are betting that people preparing for the worst day of their family's life do not want a relationship with a software company. They want to finish. Fill the folder in an afternoon, put it where their people will find it, update it once a year, and stop thinking about it.
Software that respects that is software you buy once. A subscription that lapses would defeat the purpose.
Educational, not legal advice. The two-minute readiness check needs no email address, and the complete binder guide is free to read.