What actually happens to your accounts when you die

There's a common assumption that when someone dies, their digital life sort of... sorts itself out. Accounts get flagged somehow, subscriptions stop, someone official handles it.

None of that is true.

The public sector has a small piece of this solved

The UK's Tell Us Once service lets you report a death to most government organisations in one go: HMRC, DWP, the Passport Office, the DVLA, your local council. It's genuinely useful, and it's the closest thing the UK has to a joined-up system for this.

But it only covers public-sector bodies. It does nothing for your bank, your energy supplier, your streaming subscriptions, your gym membership, your phone contract, or the hundred smaller logins that make up a normal digital life. A separate Death Notification Service exists for banks and building societies specifically, but everything else has to be cancelled manually, one company at a time, usually by a family member who's already dealing with enough.

The "obvious" workaround has a real legal problem

The instinct many families have is to just log in, using a password they already know, or one written down somewhere, and handle it themselves. In the UK, that's not as harmless as it sounds. The Computer Misuse Act 1990 makes it a criminal offence to access a computer system or account without the provider's authorisation, and that doesn't stop applying just because the account holder has died. It's rarely enforced against grieving families, but it's real, and it means providers can, and sometimes do, freeze accounts the moment they're notified, cutting off the very access a family was relying on.

Nobody automates the cancellations

Streaming services, subscriptions, memberships, recurring charges: these don't stop on their own. Someone has to notice each one exists, find the cancellation process, and go through it, individually, company by company. A few services offer a manual concierge for this kind of cleanup, at a cost, but nobody has automated it. It's still fundamentally a long list of small, tedious tasks landing on someone at the worst possible time.

What actually helps

The single most useful thing you can do isn't a legal document, it's a list. Which accounts exist, who should be told, what should happen to each one. Written down once, while you have the time and the context to get it right, it turns weeks of guesswork into an afternoon of following instructions.

That's the gap Kistkeep is built to close: pre-authorised cancellation instructions per account, ready to act on the moment they're needed, not reconstructed from scratch by someone who's grieving.