KinNestA tool for your family should outlast the people who built it.
The hardest question to ask a small company is the fairest one: what happens to my record if you disappear — or if my subscription lapses? Here are the plain answers, and the promises we are willing to put in writing.
A handover product must survive its own maker.
The cautionary tales are real. When the founder of a crypto exchange died as the only keyholder in 2019, roughly $190 million became unrecoverable. When a widely used free end-of-life planner shut down in 2025, it deleted its users' data. A product whose whole promise is "reachable by your family when it's needed" cannot end either of those ways. So we plan for our own absence, out loud.
If KinNest ever has to wind down.
You will not be surprised, and you will not be stranded. Four commitments, each one we are willing to be held to.
Before we stop the service or delete anything, we write to every account on every channel we have — email, in-app, and push. Ninety days is deliberately longer than an ordinary dormant-account warning, because a wind-down is a bigger thing.
Through that whole window you can export what you hold and keep it offline — a printable sheet pointing to your record and the people to contact, and, for a nominee, the full record they would receive as a standalone document. It works with no app and no company behind it.
We already promise never to delete a dormant account without writing to you first. This extends the same promise to our own shutdown: no silent deletion, ever, for any reason.
A promise from a small team is only as good as what happens if that team cannot act. So KinNest runs under a registered business with more than the founder able to act, and we are naming a person who can carry out this wind-down if the founder cannot. The long-term form we are committed to is a trust or not-for-profit that holds the code, keys and infrastructure, so no one person's absence can quietly end it.
A lapse freezes configuration. An already-running countdown continues.
A stopped payment does not tell us what happened. It could be you cancelling, a relative cancelling, a card that expired, you losing interest — or something happening to you. We used to read all of those as "no, don't reach my family." That made cancelling a quiet way to switch off the whole handover, and it worked best at the one moment you could no longer say otherwise. So we stopped guessing.
- STOPSYou can no longer move a running watch's date. It stays anchored at your last accepted Check in. Subscribe again to restore check-in permission.
- STOPSConfiguration and check-ins freeze. You cannot add or change entries or nominees, or check in, while coverage is over. You can still delete content, remove a nominee, and export your record.
- RUNSAn already-running watch continues. On its fixed date we reach out to the people you named and ask them to check on you. If you had not started the watch with a Check in, coverage ending creates no countdown or family contact.
- SAFEYour record is not deleted for it. Nothing is removed because a payment stopped. Subscribe again to regain configuration and check-in permission; subscription alone does not move the date or start a watch.
A failed card is not an instant cliff, either: it rides Google Play's own account hold before it counts as a lapse at all.
- ONESubscribe again. Configuration and check-in permission return. An accepted Check in then moves the date or starts a ready watch.
- TWOPause the countdown. You have to be signed in on your own device and confirm it there — never a link in an email, because anyone holding the email could press that. One pause per account. It changes nothing in your record, and only subscribing again lifts it.
- COSTIf you cancel, ignore every message for months and never pause, we will contact your family while you are perfectly well. We write straight away, then once a month, then every other day through the week before the date. But we will not pretend the messages cannot be missed.
- COSTAnd the pause has its own cost. If you pause and then something happens to you, nothing is delivered to anyone. That is the trade you make when you pause.
In one line: a lapse does not delete your record or start a new watch. If a watch was already running, its date remains and we may ask the people you named to check on you.
The limits, said plainly.
We will not claim a guarantee a small, patient operation cannot keep. What we commit to is the notice, the export, the no-silent-deletion, and the backstop above — and we will say plainly, at the point it matters, what is automated and what is a person keeping a promise. The trust or not-for-profit that will hold KinNest for the long term is a commitment we build toward as the product grows — not something we can point to today, and we would rather say that than imply it is already done. In the meantime, the promise rests on a registered business with more than one person able to act.
If you want to see exactly how the handover itself works, and where today's protection ends: how KinNest is built →