A Legacy Contact is someone you trust to carry out your wishes — usually a spouse, adult child, sibling, or close friend. You can have more than one. While you’re alive, a Legacy Contact cannot see anything in your Myend account. Nothing. Your plan stays private and locked away until access is actually triggered after your death — so you can store honest, detailed wishes now without worrying about anyone reading them early.
How access actually gets triggered
Legacy Contacts don’t get a key that opens your account whenever they like. Access requires three things together: an Access Key, email verification, and your Proof of Life check-ins lapsing. Proof of Life is a set of automated check-ins on a schedule you choose — if you stop responding, Myend escalates gradually, starting with gentle reminders to you before it ever notifies a Legacy Contact. Nothing is released by accident, and nothing is released while you’re still checking in.
Once access is triggered, here’s what a Legacy Contact can and can’t do inside each part of your plan.
Directives and your plan
After access is triggered, Legacy Contacts can view your finalized directives — healthcare, funeral, donor, and the rest. They cannot change, edit, or delete anything in your plan, at any point, whether you’re alive or not. Their role is to see and act on your wishes, not to alter them.
Messages
A Legacy Contact never sees the content of a message unless it’s addressed to them. Your goodbye messages are between you and the person you wrote them for. What a Legacy Contact can influence is timing: you choose a delivery option for each message — sent immediately after you pass, released on a specific date (like a birthday or anniversary), or left for your Legacy Contact to decide when the moment is right (trustee-timed). They only control timing on messages you’ve set up that way; they still can’t open or read a message that isn’t theirs.
Belongings
Legacy Contacts get the full list of your belongings and who each one is going to. This is by design — it’s what lets them actually carry out the handover, making sure items reach the people you selected instead of getting sorted out by guesswork.
Vault — passwords and account access
Your Vault holds encrypted credentials and instructions for your digital accounts — email, banking, social media, crypto, devices, and more. Everything in the Vault is protected with AES-256 encryption and encrypted client-side.
Legacy Contacts see an overview of what’s in your Vault, but they only get the actual access (passwords, codes) for items you’ve specifically directed to them. For every account, you assign a death action — delete it, memorialize it, hand over full access, extract the data first, extract funds, or leave a special instruction — and decide who that action goes to. A Legacy Contact only unlocks what’s been assigned to them, with the instructions you left, so they know exactly what to do rather than guessing.
Contacts
Legacy Contacts get a full overview of your Contacts directory once access is triggered. That’s intentional — it’s what lets them reach out to the people who need to know, without having to track everyone down themselves during an already difficult time.
What a Legacy Contact can never do
- See anything in your account while you’re alive.
- Change, edit, or delete your directives or plan.
- Read a message that isn’t addressed to them.
- Access Vault items that weren’t assigned to them.
- Get access without the Access Key, email verification, and a lapsed Proof of Life check-in all lining up.
A Legacy Contact is also different from a legal executor or financial trustee — though the same person can hold both roles if that makes sense for your family. Setting one up is simple: add someone as a contact, mark them as a Legacy Contact, and they’ll receive an Access Key and an invitation. Choose someone you deeply trust, since this is the person who will one day see your full plan and act on your behalf.