Where Your Estatey Data Actually Lives (And Why It Isn't on Our Servers)
If you are going to write down where all your money is, you are entitled to ask a blunt question first: where does that list end up, and who can read it?
Most services in this category answer with reassurance. Bank-level encryption. Certified data centers. Trust us.
We would rather answer with architecture.
The short version
Estatey does not keep your financial records. When you save your accounts, your property, and your key contacts, that information is written to a file in your own Google Drive, under your own account.
Our servers process it and hand it back. They do not retain it.
Why that is different from "we encrypt everything"
Encryption is good and necessary, and everyone reputable does it. But encryption is a lock on a box, and the question of who holds the box still matters enormously.
When a company stores your data, three risks come with it that no amount of encryption removes:
They can be breached. A company holding a hundred thousand estate records is a target worth attacking. A company holding none is not. The most reliable protection against a database being stolen is not having a database.
They can change. Companies get acquired. Privacy policies get revised. The people who made you a promise in year one are frequently not the people running things in year six.
They can disappear. Startups fail. When a service holding your records shuts down, you are dependent on its final act of good behavior to get your data back.
We are a small company on a free hosting tier. You should weigh all three of those risks against us specifically. Our answer is to remove ourselves from the equation: we cannot lose, leak, sell, or hold hostage a file we never possessed.
What we do store
We are not going to claim we hold nothing, because that would not be true.
We store your account credentials: your email address and a hashed version of your password. Hashed means we store a scrambled fingerprint of your password, not the password itself. We cannot read it, and if our database were stolen, neither could anyone else.
We store an encrypted token that lets us write to your Drive folder on your behalf. It is encrypted with a key held separately from the database, so possessing one without the other is useless.
That is the whole list. No account numbers. No balances. No beneficiaries. No property records.
The permission we ask for, and the one we do not
When you connect Google Drive, Google asks you to approve a specific level of access. We request the narrowest one available, called drive.file.
That permission lets an app see only the files it created itself. Estatey can read and write your Estatey file. It cannot see your photos, your tax returns, your other documents, or anything else in your Drive. Not because we promise not to look, but because Google does not grant us the ability.
The broader permission exists. Many apps request it. We did not, and that choice is visible to you on the consent screen Google shows you.
What this costs you
Honesty requires the other side of the ledger.
You need a Google account. For some people, particularly older users who never created one, that is a real barrier. We know it, we are not happy about it, and we are actively working on an alternative for people who cannot or will not use Drive.
If you lose access to your Google account, we cannot recover your data. We do not have a copy. That is the direct consequence of not holding one. Keep your Google account recoverable, and print the PDF.
You are trusting Google. We have not removed a third party from the picture, we have replaced ourselves with a much larger one. That is a reasonable trade for most people, since Google's security resources dwarf ours, but it is a trade and you should make it consciously.
The printed copy is the real backup
This is worth saying plainly, because it undercuts our own product in a way we think is correct.
Estatey produces a printable PDF designed to sit alongside your will. Print it. Put it somewhere your executor can reach. Reprint it when things change.
Paper does not require a login, a password, a working internet connection, or our company continuing to exist. If Estatey shut down tomorrow, that printed document would still do its job at the moment it was needed.
An estate record that depends on a piece of software still being around in twenty years is not a plan. It is a subscription.
Judge us by what we cannot do
Any company can tell you it takes your privacy seriously. The more useful question is what a company has made itself structurally unable to do.
We cannot read your account numbers. We cannot sell your financial profile, because we do not have one. We cannot lose your records in a breach, because they are not in our custody. We cannot lock you out of your own data, because it was never on our side of the wall.
Those are not promises. They are consequences of how the thing is built, and they hold whether or not we remain trustworthy.
Estatey helps you record what you own and where it is, so the people who need that information can find it. Estatey is not a law firm and does not provide legal, tax, or investment advice. For advice about your own situation, speak to a qualified professional in your state.