The whole idea, in a minute. Sound on — or just read on.
Almost everything you're storing memories in is a rental
Photo services, cloud drives, memory apps, the group chat — you're renting all of it. That's a perfectly reasonable arrangement for holiday snaps. It's a strange arrangement for the last recording of your mother's voice.
The awkward part is that the terms of the rental almost never surface at the moment you decide to trust something. They surface later, at the worst possible time, in an email you didn't open.
The three ways families actually lose digital memories
Not theoretically. These are the three that happen, roughly in order of frequency.
- The lapse. A card expires, a subscription quietly fails, or someone decides to trim their monthly spending. What happens next varies enormously between services: some freeze the account, some downgrade it and delete anything over the free limit, some delete everything after a grace period. The warning emails go to whichever address was used at sign-up — often one nobody checks any more.
- The shutdown. The company is acquired, pivots, or closes. There's usually an export window, and it's usually short — measured in weeks — announced by email, and by definition arriving at a moment you weren't planning for. Anyone who's used the internet for twenty years has lost something this way.
- The quiet decay. Nobody's fault at all. A phone is lost. A hard drive stops spinning. A format stops being readable. Or — the most common version of this, and the saddest — the one person who knew where everything was kept, and what the password was, is the person who is no longer there to ask.
Notice that only one of the three is about money. The other two are about access — who can get in, and whether anything survives the person who set it up. Most services think hard about the first and not at all about the other two.
Six questions to ask before you trust anything with this
Ask these of us, and of anyone else. If a service can't answer them plainly on its own website, that is itself the answer.
- On the first day after a lapsed payment, what exactly happens? "Frozen and waiting" and "deleted after 30 days" are wildly different products, and the difference is usually buried.
- Can you get everything out — at full resolution, in a format that opens without their software? An archive you can only view inside one app is not an archive; it's a subscription with sentimental hostages.
- If the account holder can't act, who can? Is there a second person with access, or does the family lose everything the day one login stops working?
- Is there any way to pay once, or is it a subscription for the rest of your life? Some things genuinely should not be billed monthly for fifty years.
- What is paywalled at the worst moments? Some services will happily put a memorial page, or access to a deceased relative's messages, behind an active subscription. Find out before, not after.
- Where does it physically live, and is it in more than one place? Encryption in transit and at rest is table stakes; redundancy is the part that actually saves you.
What Hertis promises, in writing
We built Hertis for exactly the material you cannot re-create — a parent's voice telling a story, the way they said their mother's name. So the preservation rules came before the pricing did, not after.
Stop paying, and nothing is deleted
If you stop paying, your archive is not removed. It is kept exactly as you left it, and you return to the free plan, which shows your last 30 days of moments; everything else waits, and opens again the moment anyone in the family picks up Hertis Family. Your content is kept for as long as your circle exists, and our commitment never to needlessly delete a family's shared memories is set out in our Privacy Policy, not just our marketing.
The Legacy Guarantee — paid once, not monthly
A single, optional purchase (see pricing). It keeps your family's whole history of moments open to everyone in the circle, even if a plan lapses, and a circle that holds it is never erased when someone deletes their account. It exists because some things should outlive a subscription, and a monthly bill is the wrong shape for something meant to last.
No family will ever pay to grieve
Memorial spaces are never paywalled, under any circumstances. There is no version of Hertis in which someone is asked for a card at the moment they want to hear a voice again. This is a founding rule, and it is not conditional on any plan.
Your parents never pay, and never see a price
The parent is never charged and never shown a price, and the everyday things they share, from moments to recipes to their gifts, are free on every plan. Plans are carried by the family, and any family member can be the one who carries it — so no archive depends on one person's card staying valid.
Who gets a copy
With a Legacy Guarantee, whoever looks after your circle can name up to ten people in the app. Nobody on the list is told anything now. If Hertis ever closes, we will tell your circle at least 90 days before, and give whoever looks after it, and the people named, a way to download a complete copy of your moments and stories.
And the honest part
No company can credibly promise it will exist forever, and any service that says otherwise is selling you a feeling. What we can do is make the failure modes as survivable as possible: preservation set out in our Privacy Policy rather than only in the marketing, a one-time option that doesn't depend on a recurring payment, memorial access that is never conditional, encryption in transit and at rest, and strict isolation between family circles so one family can never see another's content.
On question two above — getting everything out — you can save any photo or video to your phone from inside the app. A one-tap download of your whole archive is not in the app yet, so for a copy of anything else, write to us at hello@hertis.app and we will help. Depending on where you live, you also have formal rights of access and portability, set out in our Privacy Policy.
Whatever you decide about Hertis, do one thing this month: find out what your current service does on day one after a lapsed payment. Most people have never checked, and the answer is occasionally alarming.
Questions people ask
Nothing is deleted. Your archive is kept exactly as you left it, and you return to the free plan, which shows your last 30 days of moments; everything else waits, and opens again the moment anyone in the family picks up Hertis Family. Memorial spaces are never paywalled under any circumstances — no family will ever pay to grieve. The Legacy Guarantee, a one-time purchase, keeps your whole history of moments open even if a plan lapses.
A one-time purchase (see pricing) that keeps your family's whole history of moments open to everyone in the circle, even if a plan lapses, and means the circle is never erased when someone deletes their account. It doesn't include the rest of Hertis Family, such as the Story Vault. It's optional: nothing is deleted without it either.
Never. It's a founding rule of the product: the parent never pays and never sees a price, and the everyday things they share, from moments to recipes to their gifts, are free on every plan. Plans are carried by the family — and any family member can be the one who carries it.
Better — a Founding Month. The moment your parent says their first hello, the whole circle gets all of Hertis Family free for 30 days. No card, no auto-charge, nothing to cancel. When it ends you simply keep the free plan, and nothing your family made is deleted: anything outside the free plan waits, and opens again whenever anyone picks up Hertis Family.
You can save any photo or video to your phone from inside the app. For a copy of anything else, write to hello@hertis.app and we will help. Depending on where you live you also have formal rights of access and portability, set out in our Privacy Policy.
A Hertis circle is a family, not a single login — the archive belongs to the circle, and other family members keep their access. Any family member can be the one carrying the plan, so nothing hinges on one person's card or one person's phone.
Some things should outlive a subscription.
Hertis is on the App Store and Google Play now.
