Nestbound

When a service closes

Three companies promised to keep this safe. All three closed.

Imagine you sat down in 2009 and did the sensible thing. You wrote down where the will is, which bank the money is in, the name of the insurance company, and who your daughter should call first. You put it on a website built for exactly that, and you paid for it.

By 2016 you’d have had to do the whole thing again. Twice. Not because anybody cheated you. Because the company closed, and then the company after it closed too.

  1. The first one: Legacy Locker

    Legacy Locker opened in 2009. The idea was simple. You wrote down what your family would need to know, you said who should be told, and after you died the company passed it on. You named people who could confirm you had died, so it couldn’t be set off by mistake. In November 2013 a company called PasswordBox bought it. Everyone using Legacy Locker had two months to copy what they had written somewhere else. Then it was switched off.

  2. The second one: PasswordBox

    PasswordBox didn’t last much longer. Intel bought it in December 2014. Eleven months after that, in November 2015, PasswordBox announced it was closing as well. This time nothing moved by itself. People copied everything across by hand, one entry at a time, and one man wrote about doing five hundred of them. There was a second catch. The free version of the replacement held fifteen things. PasswordBox’s free version had held twenty-five, so anybody who had filled all twenty-five had to choose ten to throw away.

  3. The third one: Dropbox Passwords

    The most recent one closed more carefully than either of the others. On 29 July 2025 Dropbox announced that the part of its service which stored passwords was ending, and it published all the dates at once. On 28 August you could still look at what you had saved, but not add anything new. On 11 September it stopped working on phones. On 28 October it was all deleted: the passwords, the logins, the card numbers people had saved there. Three months of warning, and a button to download a copy of everything, available the whole time. As endings go, that is about as good as it gets.

Nobody here behaved badly

Companies get bought and products get closed. All three of these were handled better than most: months of warning, a proper way to take your things with you, and nobody left with a real complaint. The problem isn’t how any of them behaved.

Every one of those warnings arrived by email

They went to the person who set the account up, and to nobody else.

That is the part that doesn’t work, and no amount of extra warning fixes it.

Think about when a list like this actually gets used. After a death. During a long stay in hospital. In the months after a stroke, when somebody else is opening the mail. Those are the moments the whole thing was written for, and they’re exactly the moments when nobody is reading that email.

The three months run anyway. The message sits unopened. The deadline goes by. And on the day the family finally goes looking, what was written down for them isn’t there.

The warning worked exactly as it was meant to. It went to the one person who couldn’t act on it.

What needs no warning

Paper. A binder on a shelf has no closing date. Nobody has to be told about it and nothing has to be moved anywhere. It needs no password and no internet connection, and anyone who can open a cupboard can read it, including the relative who has never owned a computer.

You can read a whole one, every page, before you spend anything: the example binder.

Sources

Last updated 7 September 2026.