1. The promise
Heirloom commits to keeping the stories in your family’s archive safe, private, and accessible to the family members you have invited — for as long as you keep your account open, even if our company changes hands.
We do not promise to deliver anything in the future. Your family already holds the archive. What we promise is the architecture and the operating commitments that keep it there.
2. How we store your family’s archive
Every recording and letter in your family’s archive is:
- encrypted at rest with AES-256, using keys isolated per family so that no Heirloom employee can read your content;
- written to durable, versioned storage with a backup copy in a separate region, so the failure of any single provider does not lose your content;
- verified daily by an automated integrity check that compares the copies and alerts us to any divergence.
Before public launch we will add a third, cold-archive copy for additional durability.
3. Who can see what, and when
Stories are visible only to the family members you have invited and who have accepted their invitation, plus any children added by a guardian. Roles control what they can do:
- Storytellers can record new stories and edit or delete their own.
- Keepers can read every story in the archive but cannot record.
- Children are added by name and date of birth; their guardian holds access on their behalf until they are old enough to claim their own login.
The founder of the family can remove members at any time. Removal revokes future access immediately. We never auto-release stories on a date or event — access is purely a function of family membership today.
4. AI and your content
The AI Interview Assistant is the only AI surface in Heirloom that ever sees your content, and it sees only what you choose to share with it (a topic, an answer you want a follow-up on). Every API call we make to AI providers explicitly opts your content out of training. We do not include your stories in any analytics, and we will never use them in marketing without your explicit written permission.
5. If Heirloom shuts down
Heirloom is a company, and companies can end. Your family’s archive should not end with us. Our continuity commitment is:
- if Heirloom ceases operations, our archive code is released as open source so that families can continue to host their own archives;
- we are establishing a partner cooperative arrangement so that a successor organization can continue hosting families’ archives on our behalf;
- customers will be given notice and the opportunity to export their content before any wind-down.
The specifics of the cooperative arrangement will be published here as they are finalized.
6. After a storyteller passes
Because the archive is already in the family’s hands, nothing about access changes when a storyteller passes away. The stories they recorded remain in the archive, accessible to the same family members who could already see them. We do not detect or verify deaths, and we do not initiate any action when one occurs. If the deceased held the billing relationship, a surviving family member may contact us to update billing details where applicable; the archive itself continues uninterrupted.
7. What this Agreement does not cover
We promise effort and architecture, not omniscience. This Agreement does not guarantee uninterrupted service against every possible future event, and it does not cover failures caused by inaccurate information you provide or by events genuinely beyond reasonable control. Where this Agreement and the Terms of Service differ, the Terms’ limitation-of-liability section applies.
8. Contact
Questions about this Agreement can be sent to hello@yourheirloom.app.