Your Words.
Your Wishes.
Your Terms.

That is your choice, and we would rather be straight with you about it. Zero-Knowledge Encryption is available for each feature — Messages, Final Wishes, Files and your Will — and you switch it on per feature. Where it is on, your content is encrypted with a passphrase only you hold, before it reaches our servers: we cannot read it, and we cannot recover it. Where you have not switched it on, your data is protected by authentication, strict access rules and transport encryption, but it is technically readable by us. Encryption is off until you enable it, so if that matters to you, turn it on during setup or later in Settings.

When you set up a passphrase you are given a Personal Recovery Key (PRK). That is the only way to reset it — we cannot do it for you. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe and separate from your devices. If both the passphrase and the PRK are lost, the encrypted data cannot be recovered by anyone: not you, not your executor, not us. There is no backdoor. That is the honest trade for genuine privacy, and it is precisely why encryption is opt-in rather than forced on everybody.

No — and this is by design. All of your data is encrypted using a private passphrase that only you know. Your Guardian has no way to access anything until a verified death certificate has been processed. We strongly advise never sharing your passphrase with anyone — including your Guardian. Your secrets stay yours until after you pass away and your death certificate has been verified by our team.

When a Guardian submits a death certificate, our team manually inspects the document and cross-references it against public records before anything is released. Nothing is ever unlocked on the basis of a claim alone. We're also working towards direct integration with official death registration data from Credit Reference Agencies, which will make this process faster and even more robust in the future.

Arca Veritas does everything possible to make it easy for your Guardian to act — they receive clear, structured instructions and a full overview of everything you've left for them. But ultimately, choosing the right Guardian is the most important decision you'll make. Appoint someone you trust completely, and make sure they know they've been named. You can update your Guardian at any time from within the app.

Arca Veritas works independently of any will or legal arrangement — you don't need either to get started. That said, we strongly recommend appointing a digital executor in your will and assigning them as your Guardian in the app. This ensures your digital wishes carry the same legal weight as your physical ones. We have plans to work directly with solicitors and will-writing services in the future to make this even easier.

Not on its own, and we say so on every screen and on the document itself. The tool asks you plain questions and assembles a plain-language draft from vetted clauses for your jurisdiction — England & Wales, Scotland, or a generic template. It is a starting point that saves you time and money, not a substitute for a solicitor. To be legally valid a will must be properly reviewed, signed and witnessed, which is on you. Every export carries that disclaimer, and so does the copy your executor eventually sees.

Once a death certificate has been verified, your executor sees your account organised into tabs — files, passwords, messages, final wishes and your will draft — with an Export All Data button that downloads the entire estate: documents as files, passwords as a CSV, and your wishes and will as branded PDFs. Before verification they see only that you appointed them. Private messages are a special case: your executor can pass them to the intended recipient without ever being able to read them.

Yes. Arca Veritas runs in any browser and there are native apps for iOS and Android, so you can record a message on your phone, upload a document from your laptop, and pick up where you left off. Everything syncs to the same account.

We're committed to never leaving you without options. In the unlikely event that Arca Veritas closes, we will notify all users in advance and provide a minimum 14-day window to download everything you've stored — your messages, documents, wishes, and files — in full. Your legacy belongs to you, not us.