Frequently Asked Questions

If you miss a scheduled check-in, here's exactly what happens, and when:

1. Day 0 — you miss a check-in. We start sending reminders.
2. Days 3, 6, 9 — up to three reminders, one every 3 days, by email and (if you've enabled it) SMS.
3. Day 14 — if you still haven't confirmed, this is the real turning point: your custodians get a heads-up that something's wrong, and you get a final warning sent every way we can reach you — email, SMS, and an automated phone call if you've set one up.
4. Day 21 — if there's still been no response from you (and no custodian has vouched for you — see below), your custodians are granted access.

That's 21 days minimum from your first missed check-in to access being granted — not a single missed email. If you know you'll be unreachable (travel, surgery, no signal), Snooze Mode lets you pause the whole cycle for up to 90 days at a time, no reminders, no clock running.

The system is built around the assumption that any single channel might fail you at the worst possible time — that's exactly why the day-14 final warning doesn't rely on just one: it goes out by email, SMS to your verified phone, and an automated voice call, simultaneously, because this is the last checkpoint before custodians are told something's wrong.

There's also a real safety valve: if a custodian has a good reason to believe it's a false alarm — they talked to you, you mentioned being off-grid — they can vouch for you. That doesn't cancel the process; it buys another 7 days rather than resetting the clock, so one person's assumption can't quietly shut down a real emergency, but it does give you breathing room if there's an obvious explanation.

If every channel is genuinely unreachable and nobody vouches, the process proceeds on schedule. That's by design, not a gap — the entire point of Dad Is Dead is to act on a hard timeline instead of everyone assuming you're fine because nobody's heard otherwise.

No, and it's not trying to be. Think of it as three separate layers: your attorney and will legally determine what happens to your estate; a password manager securely handles your credentials; and Dad Is Dead tells your family what exists, where it is, and gets the right information to the right people the moment they actually need it. It's the practical vault and notification layer that works after your legal documents are already in place — not a substitute for them.

Access reverses immediately, at any stage — even after a custodian has already received the heads-up notification. Confirming you're okay resets the entire cycle back to normal; nothing about a false alarm lingers or requires manual cleanup on your part.

Yes. Access isn't all-or-nothing. You choose, per item, whether it's visible now, hidden until access is granted, or hidden entirely — and you can restrict any item to specific custodians instead of everyone on your list. A spouse can see your whole vault while an adult child only ever sees the one letter addressed to them.

Yes — a custodian you add has to accept your invitation before they count as an active custodian. Someone you've invited but who hasn't accepted yet has no access and isn't part of the check-in or notification cycle. This also means it's worth confirming your custodians have actually accepted, not just assuming an invite sent is an invite completed.

A custodian isn't just someone who clicks a link. Accepting your invitation requires them to sign in with Microsoft Entra ID — the same enterprise identity platform you use — and the email on their account has to exactly match the email you invited. Every action a custodian takes afterward, including the emergency-concern report and the "they're fine" vouch, is scoped to that specific authenticated identity, not a shareable token.

Routine SMS reminders (the day 3/6/9 nudges) require an Advanced or Complete subscription. But the day-14 final warning — the one that actually matters most — sends by SMS and automated voice call on every plan, as long as you've added and verified a phone number. We didn't want the highest-stakes notification in the whole system to depend on which plan you're on.

Honestly: Dad Is Dead runs on Microsoft Azure, which includes automatic database backups as part of its managed infrastructure, so your data isn't sitting on a single unprotected server. But we don't yet have a formal, tested business continuity or data-export plan with defined recovery targets — we're actively building one, and we'll publish it here once it actually exists rather than describe it before it does. See our Security page for the full picture.