Safe After Me · Side project · Ongoing
An encrypted family vault, designed and coded end to end
Safe After Me is an end-to-end encrypted vault for people preparing their own information or helping their parents get organized. It brings documents, accounts, access instructions and wishes together so chosen family members can find what they need if someone dies or becomes incapacitated.
- My work
- Product strategy, design and development
- Team
- Built with a co-founder
- Product status
- Live · Friends-and-family beta
Essential information is scattered. Getting it organized is easy to put off.
My parents had a physical box of documents. I lived in the Netherlands; my brother lived across the country from them. We tried Dropbox, but it didn’t work for them. Having the information and making it useful to the family were two different problems.
One family’s information, spread across
Paper files
Wills, legal documents, instructions
Digital copies
PDFs, accounts, email attachments
Someone’s memory
Where things are, who to call, how to get in
In an emergency, the family needs to know what exists, where it is, and how to access it.
Designing around the reasons people stop preparing
I reviewed physical filing systems, spoke with families, and met with organizations running estate-planning workshops. Three themes shaped the experience we built.
Insight
Knowing it matters doesn’t make it easy to start.
The work is emotionally difficult, and one unanswered question can stop the whole process.
Estate-planning workshop leader, describing participant feedback
“The biggest one is I can’t fill this out. I’m overwhelmed.”
What I prioritized
Build momentum with one useful step
Start with what someone can recall, personalize the next task, and let them come back to missing details.
Insight
The person preparing and the person helping may need different tools.
Paper felt familiar to some parents. Their adult children wanted a way to help and find information from elsewhere.
Estate-planning workshop leader, on working with older adults
“They want this paper. This is why it still works, that I can hand them a book.”
What I prioritized
Connect physical records to a shared vault
Record where an original is kept, add a digital copy when it’s available, and invite family members to help.
Insight
People need to trust the handoff before sharing the information.
The same information that would help a family in an emergency can feel too sensitive to write down or share.
Estate-planning workshop leader, on privacy concerns
“All my people are afraid to even write their Social Security number down in the book.”
What I prioritized
Explain protection and access where it matters
Make the roles and confirmation steps clear alongside invitations, so people understand who can access the vault.
A personal setup plan, built one useful step at a time
The vault gives the information a home. The setup experience helps people get it there. I used Noom and TurboTax as references for personalization, orientation and returning to unfinished work.
Personalize the setup
Ask what applies before asking for details
A short inventory shapes the plan around someone’s documents, family and responsibilities.
Lower the first commitment
Start with where the document lives
Recording the location is useful progress. A digital copy and more detail can follow later.
From inventory to guided setup
Follow one path through the will wizard
The inventory leads into questions about an existing will, where it is kept and the people named in it. Guidance stays beside the task.
Make the vault useful to the family
Help people find what they need next
The dashboard recommends a next task. Priority Info brings together urgent details, and invitations explain access before a family member joins.
Explore the vault after setup
The walkthrough moves from recommended tasks into the information categories and a category wizard.
The forms needed to match people’s lives, not just document names
Beta testing exposed friction even for people who had already completed their estate planning. The forms asked them to translate their documents into our categories.
Beta participant, reviewing the power-of-attorney step
“We have a medical and a financial power of attorney. So we do not know which one we’re talking about.”
Before · document categories
People had to decide where each document and decision-maker belonged.
After · the people and decisions
Prepare people for the task
I added an orientation explaining what to have ready and what the wizard would ask.
Let one document serve several purposes
I separated financial and healthcare authority, with document reuse between them.
A configurable journey we could keep refining
My co-founder and I built a custom tool to organize steps and conditional paths. It let us tailor journeys to different situations and entry points, then revise them as we learned from testing.
Different responsibilities, different paths
The Dependents and Pets wizard branches around someone’s answers. The graph makes the steps, conditions, and forward and back navigation visible in one place.
Refining the product directly in code
I worked in the Ruby on Rails application alongside my co-founder, using Claude Code and design tools to carry interaction decisions into production. These are selected examples of that work.
Building and refining the product
February to April 2026My contributions to the production repository during the initial build.
- 204
- commits authored
- 41
- pull requests merged
Selected examples of my production work
Give people a useful next step when they leave the vault
I built the Loops email templates and lifecycle events around the same setup journey. A stalled setup, a completed category and a return visit called for different prompts.
Choose a moment in the journey to see the email it prompted.
Make returning feel manageable, with a direct route back to setup.
Pick up where you left off
Hi Alex,
You started setting up your vault yesterday. That’s a great first step.
You don’t need any documents to finish. It’s just a few straightforward questions about your situation so we can organise things for you.
Continue setting upA working product, with more to learn about follow-through
Safe After Me is live in friends-and-family beta. We implemented the revised wizards and continue to test them, while exploring organization partnerships, a will builder and early acquisition experiments.
The open question is whether this guidance helps people finish preparing and keep their information current.
Visit Safe After Me