Solutions · Digital legacy
What actually happens to your accounts when you're gone?
Emails, banking, subscriptions, photos, and passwords, most of it invisible until someone has to untangle it. Here's what a digital legacy plan actually covers.
It's not just passwords.
A digital legacy is everything you'd want handled if you couldn't handle it yourself: who gets access to your accounts, what should be cancelled, where important documents live, and what you'd want said to the people who matter. Most of that lives only in your head today.
In the UK, accessing someone else's online account without the provider's authorisation is a criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, even for a grieving family member using a password they already know. Doing "the obvious thing" isn't actually simple, or legal, without a proper plan.
Why this matters more than people think.
26%
of UK adults have a clear plan for their digital life.
Law Society, 2024
60%
haven't shared any account access instructions with family.
2023 study
£50bn+
sits in unclaimed pensions, banking, and savings assets across the UK.
industry estimate
Rights that end when you do
Under UK GDPR, data protection rights cease on death, they only apply to living people. Without a plan you've put in place yourself, your family has no automatic right to see what you'd want them to.
What actually makes up a "digital legacy".
It's a broader category than most people expect, and rarely all in one place.
Financial accounts
Banking, investments, pensions, and savings, some obvious, some easy to forget entirely, like an old workplace pension from a job held a decade ago.
Communication & identity
Email, which is often the master key to resetting everything else, plus social media, messaging apps, and any account that represents "you" online.
Subscriptions & recurring charges
Streaming, software, memberships, the kind of small recurring charge that quietly continues for months if nobody knows it exists.
Digital assets with real value
Cryptocurrency, domain names, monetised social accounts, or a small online business, assets that can be worth real money but have no physical form at all.
Photos, files, and memories
Cloud photo libraries, shared albums, and personal files that exist only as data, with no physical equivalent to inherit.
Access & instructions
Not an asset itself, but the missing piece that makes everything else usable: who should get access, and what they should actually do with it.
Who actually needs to think about this.
You don't need to be older to need a plan
Accidents and sudden illness don't check someone's age first. A digital legacy plan is closer to insurance than to a retirement decision.
It matters just as much for incapacity as for death
A plan built for 'if I die' quietly also covers 'if I'm in hospital and can't manage things myself for a while', which is a far more common situation.
"I don't have much" is rarely true digitally
Most people underestimate how many accounts they actually hold until they try to list them. Twenty to thirty is typical once you actually count.
Where Kistkeep fits in.
Kistkeep isn't a legal service and doesn't replace a Will. It's the practical layer underneath one: the organised, secure place where the accounts, instructions, and access details actually live, so whoever needs them isn't starting from a blank page.