Documentation, credentials, and context — encrypted, organized, delivered to the right people only when triggered. Vaulternal is built for solo founders who can't afford to be a single point of failure.
If you're running a business — a SaaS, an agency, a consulting practice, a productized service, a content business with meaningful revenue — and that business depends materially on you being present, you are a single point of failure. Most solo founders intend to set up a continuity plan and never quite do. Vaulternal is the tool that makes it ten minutes of work to start, and an ongoing practice as your business evolves. It is not a will and not an enterprise BCDR product. It is an operational handoff system designed for one-person businesses.
The document your business doesn't have yet: how the product is built, deployed, and supported; the top customer-support situations and how to handle them; who to call when something breaks; where the team chat lives. The context that exists only in your head today, written down once and kept current. You decide who receives it and on what trigger — a date, your manual command, or a period of inactivity — so a competent person could keep the business running for a week or two without you.
Set up the handoffStripe, your domain registrar, hosting, AWS or its equivalent, the third-party SaaS the business runs on — organized for handoff, encrypted at rest, and delivered conditionally. Not a password dump: a structured access package, scoped to a specific recipient, released only on the trigger you choose. Some credentials can be immediately available; others time-locked. Refund authority, payout management, and subscription control can go to one designated operator while the rest stays sealed.
Build the access packetThe structured version of the conversation you've been meaning to have. What the business does, in plain English. Where the money comes from and where it flows. What's owed, and to whom. How to reach the lawyer and the accountant. The person closest to you doesn't run the business and shouldn't have to reverse-engineer it under pressure — so the business primer is written for a capable non-specialist, delivered only when it's needed, and only to them.
Prepare your spouseFour steps. Here's exactly what happens to your data.
1. Write or upload, on your device
You write, paste, or upload your handoff documents on your own machine. Everything is encrypted client-side — before it leaves your computer — so it reaches our servers already unreadable. "Files" here means whatever the job needs: documents, a recorded walkthrough, a voice note, screenshots, exports.
2. Set the delivery rule
Choose the recipient, the trigger condition (a date, your manual command, or inactivity), the scope, and any time-bound limits. Each rule is independent, editable, and revocable any time before it fires.
3. We hold only the encrypted package
Vaulternal stores the ciphertext. We don't hold the keys, so we can't read the contents — and neither can anyone you haven't provisioned. Every action is logged for an end-to-end audit trail.
4. The recipient is guided through delivery
When the trigger fires, your recipient is walked through verifying their identity and unlocking exactly what you left them. They need nothing pre-installed and don't have to understand the cryptography.
How the product is built, deployed, and supported. The top customer-support situations and the steps to resolve them. Outage response, and who to call when. The day-to-day knowledge that keeps the lights on, written so a competent operator can act without guessing.
Every recurring vendor, every contract, every standing obligation. Renewal dates, contact people, and the scope of each relationship — so nothing auto-renews unnoticed and nothing critical lapses while you're away.
Stripe, hosting, the domain registrar, AWS or equivalent, third-party SaaS, internal tools. Categorized by criticality, scoped per recipient, and released on the trigger you set — not handed over all at once.
A plain-English explanation of what the business does, where money flows, what's owed and to whom, and how to reach the lawyer and accountant. Written for the person closest to you, not for an operator.
Customer history, the most common issues, response templates, and escalation paths — enough for a capable stand-in to keep customers cared for through a week or two of your absence.
If the business needs to close cleanly: customer notification, the refund process, the vendor-cancellation list, and the tax-filing obligations. Rarely opened, invaluable when it is.
A pre-written response for when someone reaches out to buy. Recent metrics, the financial documents, and a broker contact if relevant — so an inbound offer doesn't catch the business flat-footed.
An inactivity-triggered delivery of the operational handoff if you're unreachable for a period you configure — 30, 60, or 90 days. A quiet backstop that does nothing until it's genuinely needed.
Your accountant's contact, where the financial records live, the filing schedule, and any pending obligations. The part founders tend to forget until tax season — gathered once, so no one has to reconstruct it under a deadline.
The honest version. Most of these are tools founders genuinely use — here's where each one wins, and where it runs out of room.
1Password handles your passwords, and its Emergency Access lets a trusted contact recover them after a waiting period. Vaulternal handles the rest: the structured handoff documents, the runbook, the vendor relationships, the customer context a password manager was never meant to hold — with granular triggers, multiple recipients at different scopes, and no requirement that recipients use Vaulternal.
1Password wins for pure password recovery, and if you already run it, keep it.
Faster to start, free, and familiar. But anyone with the link can read it — including the platform — it dies with your account, and it can't deliver itself conditionally or scope access to a specific recipient.
Wins on speed to first draft. A fine place to start; a risky place to stop.
Old-school but real. Hard to update, doesn't scale, and won't deliver electronically — which makes it a poor fit for operational documents that change every week.
Wins for a small set of genuinely sensitive, rarely-changing instructions.
Veeam, Rubrik, Datto and the like are for backup, disaster recovery, and large-org continuity. A different category. Vaulternal is for the human and operational layer — the context, not the infrastructure.
Legal instruments, and you should have the ones that apply to you. Vaulternal doesn't replace them — it complements them by carrying the operational handoff that legal paperwork was never meant to cover.
Documents and credentials together. No account required for recipients. Granular triggers, scopes, and expirations. And scheduled deliveries that are committed when you set them, so they hold independently of your subscription.
You read this section more carefully than most visitors do — so the claims here are precise.
Files are encrypted on your own device, with keys that stay with you. We store only the encrypted package and never hold the keys to open it — so we cannot read your contents, and neither can anyone you haven't provisioned.
Every delivery is a rule you set: a date, your manual command, an inactivity window, or a combination. Each recipient gets a key wrapped specifically for them. You can edit, cancel, or re-scope any rule before it fires, and every action is auditable end-to-end.
Scheduled deliveries are committed at the moment you schedule them, regardless of subscription status, and storage is redundant today. For deliveries that must survive any single company's existence, on-chain permanence is available as an option at scheduling time.
Start free, add your first packet, and upgrade only when you outgrow it. For most founders the hard part was never the price — it was finding the ten minutes to begin.
Try the vault. Store your most important files. Set one delivery rule.
For the files and people that matter most. Multiple recipients, real-time family sharing.
Billed $84.00/year
Everything Vaulternal can do. Unlimited rules, all delivery types, full vault.
Billed $180.00/year
No credit card. 2 GB free. Works with Google, Microsoft, or email login.