Terms and Conditions

1 Who these terms are between

These Terms and Conditions ("Terms") are a contract between you and Estate Untangled LLC, a company registered in the United Arab Emirates under Formation Number 2649142 and holding License Number 2649142.01 ("Estate Untangled", "we", "us", "our"). They govern your access to and use of the website at estateuntangled.com, the Estate Untangled application, and the guided master file, encrypted vault, and death claim services offered through it (together, the "Service").

2 Acceptance of these terms

By creating an account, subscribing, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference. If you don't agree, don't use the Service.

If you're using the Service on behalf of a business, an organisation, or another person, you confirm you have the authority to accept these Terms on their behalf, and "you" in these Terms includes them.

3 Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old, and have the legal capacity to enter into a binding contract, to create an account. The Service is not directed at, and must not be used by, children.

You confirm that the information you provide when creating an account is accurate and that it's genuinely you (or an entity you're properly authorised to represent) opening the account.

4 What the service is — and isn't

Estate Untangled helps you build a private, encrypted master file of the accounts, documents, and wishes your family or executor would otherwise have to hunt for after your death — organised through a guided set of questions across topics including trusted contacts, property, financial accounts, insurance, digital accounts, legal documents, and personal wishes — and lets you name a trusted contact who can request access to that file after you die, subject to the process described in section 7.

The Service is not, and must not be treated as:

• legal advice, financial advice, tax advice, or estate-planning advice;
• a will, a substitute for a will, or a way of making a legally binding disposition of your property — storing information about your assets or wishes in Estate Untangled has no effect on who legally inherits them;
• a probate service, an executor, or a substitute for formal estate administration — a trusted contact being granted read access to your vault is an information disclosure, not a transfer of legal title, authority, or responsibility over anything described in it;
• a will-storage, deed-storage, or safe-custody service for physical original documents — the vault stores digital copies and information only;
• a death-registration, coroner, or official record-keeping service — nothing in the Service constitutes legal proof or notification of death for any government, financial institution, or other third party.

You're responsible for having a valid will and, where relevant, proper professional advice; Estate Untangled is a tool for organising and eventually sharing information, not a replacement for either.

5 Your account

You're responsible for keeping your login credentials confidential and for all activity that happens under your account. Tell us immediately via our contact page if you believe your account has been accessed without your authorisation.

Each account is for one individual's own information. You may name one trusted contact per account through the guided flow; the mechanics of that are covered in section 7.

You're responsible for keeping the information in your account — including your own contact details and your trusted contact's name and email address — accurate and up to date. An out-of-date trusted contact email is the single most common way this whole system can fail, since it's the only address a death claim, and the owner-notification email described in section 7, can be sent to.

6 Subscriptions, fees and billing

The standard plan is billed monthly in advance at the price shown on our pricing page (currently £8/month) via our payment processor, Stripe. There is no free trial; your subscription begins, and billing starts, when you sign up.

Your subscription renews automatically each month until you cancel. You can cancel at any time through the billing portal linked from your dashboard; cancelling stops future renewals but doesn't refund the current billing period, and you'll keep access until the end of the period you've already paid for.

We may change our prices. If we do, we'll give you reasonable notice before a price change applies to your next renewal; continuing to use the Service after a price change takes effect means you accept the new price. We don't offer refunds for partial billing periods except where required by law.

If a payment fails, we (or Stripe on our behalf) may retry it and may suspend access to the Service until payment succeeds.

If you need help after a death has already happened rather than an ongoing subscription, we offer a separate quoted service described on our help page; the scope and price of that work is agreed with you individually before it begins and isn't covered by this section.

7 The death claim and vault release process

This is the most important section of these Terms to read carefully, because it describes how — and how imperfectly — access to your vault can ever be granted to someone else.

7.1 How a claim is made

Every account has one private, unguessable claim link. Anyone with that link can submit a request for access (a "claim") by providing their name, email address, relationship to you, and an optional message. We do not independently verify the claimant's identity, their relationship to you, or the fact of your death at the point a claim is submitted — the link itself is the only credential involved at this stage.

7.2 Your contest window

As soon as a claim is submitted, we email the account holder's registered email address to say a claim has been made, with a link to cancel it. If you're alive and well and see this email, cancelling takes one click and closes the claim immediately — no explanation required. This window is currently 14 days from submission.

This is the only safeguard against a false or malicious claim before human review, and it depends entirely on you actually seeing and acting on that email. If your registered email address is wrong, inactive, or the email is filtered as spam, the claim proceeds to review without you ever having a chance to contest it.

7.3 Human review — there is no automatic release

No claim is ever approved automatically, whether or not the 14-day window has passed uncontested. Every claim is reviewed individually by a member of the Estate Untangled team, who may approve it, deny it, or seek further information first. We may take into account whether the window passed uncontested, but that fact alone doesn't guarantee approval, and an early or urgent claim isn't automatically refused either.

This review is a judgement call made on the information available to us — which is often limited to what the claimant has told us. We cannot independently confirm that you have died, that the claimant is who they say they are, or that they're entitled under any will, law, or family arrangement to see this information. Approval means we judged the claim credible enough to release read access to the vault; it is not, and must not be relied upon as, legal proof of death or of anyone's entitlement to your estate.

7.4 What approval actually grants

If a claim is approved, the claimant is issued a separate, time-limited access link to a read-only view of your vault's contents as they stood at the time of approval. This does not grant them your login, does not let them change or delete anything, and does not transfer your subscription, account, or any legal rights to them.

7.5 Risk you're accepting by using this feature

By naming a trusted contact and keeping this feature enabled, you accept that:

• a wrongful, fraudulent, or premature claim could, despite our review process, result in someone seeing your information while you're still alive;
• a genuine claim could be delayed, denied, or never made at all — for example if nobody who knows the claim link survives you, or a genuine claimant is disbelieved;
• our review process is a good-faith human judgement, not a verification service, and is not a substitute for the legal processes (grant of probate, letters of administration, or equivalent) that actually establish who is entitled to a deceased person's estate.

If you'd rather not accept this risk, don't complete the trusted-contact step, or ask us to disable it for your account.

8 Trusted contacts and claimants

A person you name as a trusted contact, and a person who submits or is granted a claim, is not a party to these Terms and has no account, subscription, or contractual relationship with us in that capacity. Their use of a claim link or an approved access link is subject to these Terms to the extent they apply, and to any additional instructions we give them (for example, in the emails described in section 7), but they have no independent right to demand a claim be approved, expedited, or reopened once decided.

We may, at our discretion, contact a claimant for more information, decline to explain the reasoning behind a decision in detail, and reverse an approval (disabling further access) if we later have reason to believe it was obtained by fraud or mistake — though we can't undo access already taken during the period the link was valid.

9 Your content

You keep ownership of everything you store in your vault — your answers, documents, and any other information you provide ("Your Content"). You grant us a limited licence to store, encrypt, process, back up, and (only as described in section 7) disclose Your Content solely in order to provide the Service to you and, where applicable, to an approved claimant.

You're responsible for the accuracy of Your Content and for having the right to store and share it — for example, not uploading someone else's sensitive personal documents without a proper basis for doing so.

10 Acceptable use

You agree not to use the Service to store or transmit anything unlawful, to misrepresent your identity, to submit a knowingly false death claim, to attempt to access another person's account or vault without authorisation, to interfere with or attempt to disrupt the Service, or to reverse-engineer or attempt to circumvent its security measures.

We may investigate suspected misuse and take proportionate action, including suspending or terminating the account involved, and, where a claim is involved, treating it as denied.

11 Data protection and security

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect Your Content, including field-level encryption of sensitive account details using a managed key-management service, and access controls limiting who and what can decrypt it. Documents you upload are stored in access-controlled cloud storage. Details of what we collect, why, and your rights over it are set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

As a UAE entity, we process personal data in accordance with UAE Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data ("UAE PDPL"). Where a customer is based in the UK or EEA, we also apply the data-protection standards of the UK GDPR and/or EU GDPR as a baseline — including lawful basis for processing, data minimisation, and the subject-rights set out in our Privacy Policy — regardless of whether UAE PDPL itself would require it, so that no customer gets a lower standard of protection because of where our entity happens to be registered.

No method of electronic storage or transmission is completely secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security. You're responsible for choosing a strong, unique password and for the security of the device and email account you use to access the Service.

Because our infrastructure providers (including our hosting, database, and encryption key-management providers) operate internationally, Your Content may be processed and stored outside the country you live in, including outside the UK, EEA, or UAE. Where that involves a transfer out of the UK or EEA, we rely on that provider's own standard contractual clauses, an adequacy decision, or an equivalent lawful transfer mechanism; where it involves a transfer out of the UAE, we take reasonable steps to ensure the receiving country or provider maintains an adequate level of protection consistent with the UAE PDPL.

12 Intellectual property

Estate Untangled and its licensors own all rights in the Service itself — the software, design, branding, and underlying technology — excluding Your Content. Nothing in these Terms transfers any of that to you; you get a personal, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the Service in accordance with these Terms for as long as your account is active.

You may not copy, modify, resell, or create derivative works from the Service, except to the extent the law gives you a right we can't exclude.

13 Third-party services

We rely on third-party infrastructure to provide the Service, including hosting, database, authentication, cloud storage, encryption key management, email delivery, and payment processing providers. Your use of the Service is also subject to those providers' own terms where you interact with them directly (for example, Stripe's terms when you enter payment details). We're not responsible for outages, errors, or data loss caused by a third-party provider's failure, though we'll act reasonably to restore service and, where relevant, tell you if it affects your data.

14 Service availability

We aim to keep the Service available and reliable but don't guarantee it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or available at all times. We may suspend access for maintenance, security reasons, or circumstances outside our reasonable control, and will try to give notice where practical for planned maintenance.

15 Disclaimers

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including as to merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, or that a death claim will be identified, decided, or acted upon within any particular time.

Nothing in this section excludes or limits a warranty, right, or remedy that can't lawfully be excluded, including under applicable consumer protection law in the jurisdiction where you're based.

16 Limitation of liability

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that can't lawfully be excluded or limited.

Subject to that, to the maximum extent permitted by law:

1. we're not liable for any indirect, special, incidental, or consequential loss, or for loss of profits, data, or goodwill, arising from your use of the Service;
2. we're not liable for the consequences of a death claim being approved, denied, delayed, or never made — including a claim we approve turning out to be false, or a genuine claimant being refused or never able to make one — except where that outcome was caused by our own negligence or wilful misconduct;
3. our total liability to you arising out of or in connection with these Terms, however caused, is limited to the total amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or £100, whichever is greater.

17 Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless against any claim, loss, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Service, or Your Content infringing someone else's rights or being unlawful — except to the extent caused by our own breach or negligence.

18 Suspension and termination

You can close your account at any time; doing so cancels your subscription per section 6 and, subject to section 19, removes your claim link so no future claim can be made against it.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms, if we reasonably suspect fraud or misuse, if required by law, or if payment fails and isn't resolved within a reasonable period after notice. Where practical, we'll give you notice and a chance to fix the issue first.

19 What happens to your data afterwards

If you close your account or it's terminated, we'll delete Your Content within 30 days, except where we're required to keep it longer by law, or where it's needed to resolve a dispute or claim already in progress.

An approved claimant's access link expires after a limited period shown to the claimant at the time of access; it isn't a standing account and doesn't grant ongoing access.

20 Changes to the service and these terms

We may update the Service and these Terms from time to time — for example, to reflect a new feature, a legal requirement, or a change in how the death claim process works. If a change is material, we'll take reasonable steps to notify you (such as an email or an in-app notice) before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms; if you don't agree, you should stop using the Service and close your account.

21 Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates, matching the jurisdiction of the contracting entity, without regard to conflict-of-law principles, and any dispute will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the United Arab Emirates.

If you're a consumer, this doesn't take away any protection given to you by mandatory laws of the country where you live — those may continue to apply regardless of this clause.

22 General

If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Our failure to enforce a right isn't a waiver of it. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms without our consent; we may transfer ours in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, provided the new party is bound by terms at least as protective of you. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service. A person who isn't a party to these Terms — including a trusted contact or claimant acting only in that capacity — has no right to enforce them, except as expressly stated in section 8.

23 Contact

Questions about these Terms can be sent via our contact page.