The hardest day shouldn't come with a treasure hunt.

When someone we love dies, grief arrives first. What follows, too often, is something quieter and crueller: the search. The hunt through drawers and inboxes and old paperwork for the bank that holds the account, the insurer who issued the policy, the password to the phone, the wishes never written down.

The Life File was built to end that search. We believe the people you leave behind should inherit clarity, not a puzzle — that everything they need should be in one place, organised and ready, exactly when they need it and never a moment before.

Why we built it

Almost everyone has a version of the same story — a relative who passed, and the months that followed spent piecing together a life's worth of accounts, documents, and logins that lived only in one person's head. Banks that wouldn't talk to you. Policies discovered too late. Subscriptions billing a closed account for years.

It doesn't have to be this way. The information exists; it's just scattered, and locked behind a person who can no longer hand you the key. We set out to build the one place that holds it all — secure enough to trust with your whole life, and simple enough to actually keep up to date.

Privacy isn't a feature. It's the foundation.

A vault for your most sensitive information is only worth having if it's genuinely private — not "private unless we're asked," but private by design. So we built The Life File on a principle called zero-knowledge encryption.

In plain terms: your records are encrypted on your own device, with a key derived from your password — a key that never leaves your hands. We can't read your data. Our staff can't, our servers can't, and no-one with a court order can compel us to hand over something we simply do not possess. If we were ever breached, an intruder would find nothing but unreadable cipher. You hold the only key, and that is exactly how it should be.

Built for the people you trust

A life file is no use if no-one can ever open it. So we designed a way to pass access on that doesn't compromise the privacy that makes it worth having. You can bring family into a shared circle, and designate executors — the people who should be able to step in when the time comes.

That access is sealed cryptographically to them and them alone, and released only after a real, verified bereavement — reviewed by a person, never triggered automatically. Until that day, no-one but you can see a thing. It is privacy and inheritance, finally working together rather than against each other.

A quiet kind of peace of mind

The Life File isn't about dwelling on the end. It's about taking an hour now so that, one day, the people you love are spared the search — and given instead the simple, enormous relief of knowing exactly where everything is.

That's the whole idea. Everything that matters, in one secure place, ready for the people who'll need it.