There is an awkward question underneath every service that promises to pass something on to your family, and it is worth asking out loud.

The promise comes due long after you paid for it, on a day nobody can predict, for a customer who is no longer able to complain. That is an unusual thing to sell. Most software is judged the week you buy it. This kind is judged once, years later, by people who never chose it.

Once a company decides it must be trusted with something this serious, it starts adding parts. Each part is reasonable on its own.

Someone has to confirm that something has happened, so there is a person who reads documents and decides. There is a process for the family to apply, and a queue behind it, and somebody answering the queue. Often the company also offers to hold the valuables itself, which means a safe, an auditor and a licence. Then there is the paperwork, which is different in every state and every country, so there are lawyers too.

None of that is wasted. It is real work, done by real people.

But it is work that has to be paid for every month, by everybody, whether or not a single family ever needs it. It does not get cheaper as more people join, because each new family brings its own possible case. And when one of those cases is disputed, the company finds itself standing between relatives on the worst day of their lives.

Two things tend to follow. The price goes up, because it has to. Or the promise quietly becomes smaller than it sounded, because the work was never affordable at that price. Neither of those is dishonesty. It is arithmetic that was always going to arrive.

The part that should worry a buyer is what happens when the money slows down. The review desk is the first thing to go — in a product whose only job is to work on a day nobody can schedule.

Instead of asking what we could add to seem trustworthy, we asked what we could remove and still do the job.

We do not decide whether something has happened to you. That was never ours to judge, and a company that judges it will get it wrong sooner or later. There is no application to fill in with us, no queue, and no file for anyone to open on your behalf. We do not hold your valuables — we hold what you wrote down about them. We are not a will, and we settle nothing about who receives what.

You are not applying to us for anything. There is no form to send, nothing to prove, and nobody here deciding whether your family qualifies.

You choose who, and you can change that whenever you like. Nothing opens while you are still answering, and one tap stops it at any point. If we are ever wrong, you are the one who corrects us, immediately, without asking anyone's permission.

Your family's side is simpler too. When the time comes they go to the bank, or the insurer, or the registrar, exactly as they would have anyway — we cannot make any of them release anything, and we have never pretended otherwise. What they will have is the list, and the account numbers, and the address of the locker. That is the part that usually takes months.

A smoke alarm is inexpensive because it does not put out fires. It notices, and it wakes the people in the house. A fire brigade costs a great deal more, and it costs that whether or not your house ever catches.

We are the alarm. Our costs barely move when another family joins, because there is no case for anyone to review and nothing of yours sitting in a safe that has to be insured. That is why the price can be ₹999 for the first year, then ₹1,499/year; or ₹99/month for the first 12 months, then ₹149/month — one plan, everything included. Beta is free; these are the intended India prices after beta, and checkout is not open.

A service that has promised to verify, to adjudicate and to hold has to pay for those people whether or not you ever need them. We have not promised those things, so you are not paying for them.

Being honest about this is the same argument from the other side, so here it is without softening.

• KinNest does not ask for access to your financial accounts or login credentials. We recommend keeping passwords, PINs and other access credentials separately, and recording where to find them in KinNest.
• We do not decide who inherits. The law does that, and a will does that.
• We keep the photographs and scans you choose to attach, because a family recognising a document matters. We do not keep the keys to anything.
• We cannot prove you are alive. We can only know that somebody holding your account said so. That is why the people you named are asked, and why nothing rests on our judgement alone.

A machine with few moving parts has few ways to stop.

For your record to reach the people you named, nobody here has to be sitting at a desk. There is no team whose job is to review your case, because there is no case to review. The parts that have to keep working are the ones that already run while everyone is asleep.

We are not funded by investors, so there is no day when somebody else's patience runs out and decides what happens to your record. What it costs us to keep one family's record safe is small, and it stays small as more families arrive. We would rather promise you less, and keep all of it.