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.
Nothing is ever deleted
If you stop paying, your archive is not removed. It waits for you, safe, exactly as you left it — you simply return to the free plan. Your content is kept for as long as your circle exists, and our commitment never to needlessly delete a family's shared memories is written into our Terms, not just our marketing.
The Legacy Guarantee — $149, once
One payment, forever. It preserves your family's entire archive — every voice note, every story, every photograph — beyond lapsed plans, beyond loss, passed intact to your children's children. It exists precisely because some things should outlive a subscription, and because a monthly bill is the wrong shape for a fifty-year promise.
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, never shown a price, and their sharing is never limited or paywalled. 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.
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 written into the terms rather than the marketing, a one-time option that doesn't depend on a recurring payment, memorial access that is never conditional, a self-serve export so your archive is never held hostage, 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 export your family archive yourself, from Settings → Your data & safety inside the app. You don't have to ask us, and you don't have to be leaving to do it. Beyond that, depending on where you live you have formal rights of access and portability set out in our Privacy Policy, and you can start one by writing to hello@hertis.app.
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 ever deleted. Your archive waits for you, safe, exactly as you left it, and you return to the free plan. Memorial spaces are never paywalled under any circumstances — no family will ever pay to grieve. The Legacy Guarantee makes preservation permanent with a single payment, if you want it in writing.
A one-time $149 purchase that preserves your family's entire archive — every voice note, story and photograph — beyond lapsed plans and beyond loss, passed intact to your children's children. One payment, forever. It's optional: nothing is deleted without it either.
Never. It's a founding rule of the product: the parent never pays, never sees a price, and their sharing is never limited. 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 every Hertis feature free for 30 days. No card, no auto-charge, nothing to cancel. When it ends you simply keep the free plan, and everything your family made stays exactly where you left it.
Yes. You can export your family archive yourself from Settings → Your data & safety in the app — you don't need to ask us, and you don't need to be leaving. Depending on where you live you also have formal rights of access and portability, set out in our Privacy Policy; write to hello@hertis.app to start one.
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.
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