How it works
A careful hand-off, one step at a time.
SuddenGone does two jobs. While you are here, it keeps one complete list, passwords and numbers included, and lets your people know if you go quiet. After you are gone, it gets that list to the right people, and only after the checks below.
Setting it up
- Step 1
Start with the guide
After you sign up, the guide asks what is true of your life: children, a home, a business, crypto, things you would want deleted. From your answers it builds your own plan in 11 short chapters, with the steps that matter most first.
Each step opens in place. You fill it in, it is sealed, and it ticks itself off. Skip anything that does not apply, and come back when life changes: a marriage, a move, a new phone.
- Step 2
Fill the envelope
Add what your family would need on the day: each account and how to sign in to it, your Social Security number, the phone passcode, the bills on autopay, where the signed original of your will is, who to call and what you would want. There are 19 short sections on 5 shelves, and you fill in only what applies.
Write the real thing. A sign-in name with its password, a full account number, the combination to the safe, exactly where the gold is, the recovery phrase for a crypto wallet, the car kept in a friend's barn. Sensitive fields are hidden on screen until you ask to see them.
Already keep your logins in a browser or a password manager? Export them once and import the file. It is read on your device and every login is sealed there. Search finds any entry, and an entry you have not looked at for a year gets a quiet flag asking if it is still correct.
- Step 3
It is sealed before it leaves your device
Every entry is encrypted in your browser with a key made from your password. What reaches our servers is sealed data. We cannot read it, search it or hand it to anyone in readable form.
You get a recovery code once, at sign-up. Keep it with your important papers. It is the only way back in if you forget your password. It is for you alone: your family never needs it.
You can add a second step at sign-in with an authenticator app, see which devices are signed in, and choose how quickly the vault locks itself when you step away.
- Step 4
Choose your people and get each one their key
Name the people who should receive the envelope. For each one, your browser makes a card with a code on it. Text it, email it or print it for them right then, so it is already in their hands. You can ask them to try it once; nothing is opened.
Add a backup key if you like: a question only that person can answer. It opens the same envelope if the card is lost or never reached them.
The card, or the answer, is half of a key. The other half stays with us until release. One without the other opens nothing, so a card in a drawer is harmless while you are alive.
Then give people their parts. One person may go first and tidy up private things. One may step in if you are alive but cannot act. And people who hold no card, an employer, a landlord, friends online, can each be sent a short note when the envelope is released.
- Step 5
Make the papers that give someone the right to act
A password lets someone in. Only a signed paper lets them act. In your account you can make your own power of attorney, health care directive, will, living trust, digital assets authorisation and letter of instruction by answering plain questions. The document is put together on your device.
Print it, then sign it the way your state or country requires: usually witnesses for a will and a notary for a power of attorney. Nothing counts until it is signed. The guide flags any paper that is still unsigned.
- Step 6
Turn on check-ins if you want them
Pick daily, weekly, every two weeks or monthly. We send a reminder and you tap one button. That is the whole check-in.
If you miss it, you get three reminders over several days. Only then do your people get a note asking them to look in on you.
If it happens tonight
Your family needs nothing of yours.
A sudden death leaves a locked phone, an email nobody can open and recovery codes nobody can find. So the hand-off is built to need none of them. This is all each person uses:
Their own email
Each person's link arrives at their own address. Nobody signs in to anything of yours, and your recovery code plays no part.
Their own key
The card you sent them the day you made it. If it is lost or was never handed over, the answer to the question you set for them opens the same envelope.
A way to start without the email
A family member who cannot find their link, or only suspects you used SuddenGone, goes to the page for families, types their own email and gets the link again, or asks our staff to look.
A sheet in plain sight
A one-page sheet for the fridge says an envelope exists, who holds a card and how to start. It carries no secrets.
Check-ins
What a check-in does, and what it never does.
Silence is weak evidence. People go quiet because of a hospital stay, a broken phone or a long trip. So going quiet only ever asks someone to check on you.
A check-in does
- Reminds you by email on the schedule you chose
- Lets you check in with one tap, no sign-in needed
- Tells the people you chose if you miss three reminders
- Sends them an all-clear the moment you check in again
- Can be paused by you for up to a year when you travel or are unwell
- Can be paused by any of your people if you are alive but out of reach
A check-in does not
- Open your envelope, ever, however long you are quiet
- Share anything you wrote with the people it alerts
- Track your phone, your location or your activity
- Treat illness, a hospital stay, custody or a long trip as a passing
Alive, but not answering
In hospital, away or out of reach is not the same as gone.
People drop out of contact for long stretches and come back. A hospital and then rehab. A sentence served. Months at sea. A stolen phone. SuddenGone never presumes someone has died because they stopped answering.
Silence starts nothing
No amount of quiet opens an envelope. Not a month, not a year. A release can only begin with a report that includes a death certificate.
You can pause it yourself
Surgery coming up, a long trip, a deployment? Pause your check-ins for up to a year. No reminders, no alerts, and you can switch them back on whenever you like.
Your people can speak for you
If you cannot pause it yourself, any person you named can tell us you are alive but cannot check in: in hospital or care, detained or in custody, traveling or deployed, or having trouble with a phone or email. Alerts pause for one, three or six months, the pause can be renewed, and the others you named are told.
A report gets extra time if you were quiet
If someone files a report while you are quiet or paused, the waiting period is the full 30 days, whatever length you chose. Everyone else you named hears about the report, and any one of them can stop it at once.
Alive, but unable to act
A stroke, a coma, months in hospital. Someone still has to pay the bills.
This is not a release, and nobody receives your envelope. One person you chose is shown only what they need to keep things running.
- 1
You choose one person
Your agent, and exactly which sections they may see in that case: the bills, your health notes, the phone, the logins.
- 2
They tell us, with a doctor's letter
From their own private page. A person at SuddenGone reads it. Everyone else you named is told.
- 3
A waiting period runs
We write to you throughout. You, or anyone you named, can stop it with one tap.
- 4
Only that person sees only those sections
Nothing else is released, to them or to anyone. The account stays yours, and you can end their access when you are back.
Seeing the bills is not the same as having the right to pay them from your account. That right comes from a power of attorney, which you sign while you are well. It works only while you are alive and ends at death, which is why a will and beneficiary names matter too. Which paper does what
The release, honestly
What happens after someone reports a passing.
Nothing here is instant, on purpose. Each step is a chance to stop a mistake.
Day 0
Someone you chose reports a passing
A person you named, or the funeral home or advisor who introduced you to SuddenGone, tells us from their own private page. They give the date and upload the death certificate. Every report needs one, with no exceptions. They also agree, in writing, that a false report is fraud.
Within days
A person reviews the certificate
A report from a family member is looked at by a human, together with the certificate, before anything can move. A report with no certificate, or one that does not match, is stopped here. A report from a funeral home we have verified is accepted with its certificate, because confirming a death is their daily work. The waiting period still runs in full.
7 to 30 days
The waiting period runs, and you can cancel it
The moment a report is filed, we write to you at your main and second email address, and again every three days. Each message has one large button: "I'm alive". One tap cancels the report and tells the person who filed it. Everyone else you named is told about the report too, and any one of them can stop it at once from their own link. You choose the length of the wait on a paid plan. On the Free plan it is 30 days. If you had already gone quiet or paused your check-ins when the report came in, the wait is the full 30 days whatever you chose.
After the wait
It opens first for the person you asked to go first
If you chose someone to tidy up private things, their envelope opens before anyone else's, and it alone contains your clean-up list. Entries you marked "never hand this over" are destroyed at this point, unread. If you chose nobody to go first, every envelope opens now.
When they are done, or after 7 days
Then it opens for everyone else
The person who went first presses a button to say they have finished, and the rest of the envelopes open, phone passcode included. If they never press it, the others open anyway after the wait you chose, seven days unless you changed it. Each person gets a link, enters the code from their card or the answer to their question, and the envelope opens in their browser. We still cannot read it. The short notes you left for people who hold no card are emailed now.
The first month
The family gets a plan, not a pile
The opened envelope is arranged as first steps: what to do today, where the will is, which accounts have a named beneficiary and can be claimed directly, which sign-ins to use first, which bills to cancel, and what can wait. Passwords and numbers stay hidden until the person asks to see each one. Everything can be printed as a binder, with or without the secrets.
What we cannot do, said plainly
No service can reach into a phone or a cloud account and delete things, and SuddenGone does not pretend to. Private clean-up works because a person you trust goes first, with your list and your passcodes. How to set it up
And if you stop paying?
Your entries stay sealed and stored. Check-ins pause and you cannot add new entries beyond the Free limits. The hand-off still works exactly as described above. A closed card must never be the reason a family is left without the list.