Questions & answers

Final Note lets you leave a private message for one person you trust, to be delivered only if something happens to you.

You write your note, lock it with a secret key that only you know, and choose who should receive it. After that, you simply check in from time to time to say “I’m OK”. If you stop checking in, we send your note to that person.

People use it for things like:

• where important accounts, documents and passwords can be found
• practical instructions for the people left to sort things out
• a personal letter to someone they love

Checking in is how you tell us you’re fine. It takes one tap.

1. Choose how often to check in. When you write a note, you pick every 30, 60 or 90 days.
2. Check in before the time runs out. Log in to your vault and press the gold “I’M OK” button. The countdown starts again from that moment.
3. Missed one? There’s extra time. If you miss your check-in, a grace period of 7 or 14 days (your choice) begins. Nothing is sent during this time, and checking in cancels it.
4. Only then is your note sent. If the grace period ends with no check-in, we email your chosen person a link to your note.

For example: with a 30-day check-in and 7 days of grace, your note is sent only after 37 days with no word from you.

Your plan needs to be active for this to work. If your subscription ends, your note is paused, so nothing is sent by mistake. When you renew, the countdown starts fresh.

Not after it’s sealed, for now. Once you press “Encrypt and seal”, the note is locked with your secret key and stays exactly as you wrote it. The same goes for who receives it and how often you check in.

This is a side effect of how we protect you: we never have your secret key, so we can’t open your note to change it on your behalf.

If something changes in your life:

• To say something new, write and seal a new note from your vault. Each note is kept and checked in separately.
• To remove an old note, email us at support@getfinalnote.com from your account’s email address and tell us which one. We can delete it, but we still can’t read it.

Tip: rather than writing a password directly into your note, you can write where it’s kept (for example, “in the blue folder in the desk drawer”). That way the note stays true even when the password changes.

Your note is locked on your own device before it ever reaches us. Think of it like putting a letter in a safe in your own home, and only then handing us the locked safe. We store the safe, but we never get the combination.

• Your secret key never leaves your device. We never see it or store it.
• Nobody at Final Note can read your note: not our staff, not a hacker who broke into our systems, and not anyone who asked us to hand it over.
• The lock is AES-256 encryption, the same standard banks and governments rely on.

There is one thing to plan for. Because only your secret key opens the note, the person receiving it needs that key too. Give it to them yourself, away from the internet: written on paper, told in person, or left somewhere they know to look.

If the secret key is lost, the note can never be opened, by anyone, including us. There is no reset link.

Use a few ordinary words strung together, rather than a short password. A long phrase is both harder to guess and easier to remember.

For example, a phrase like:

ilovemumscooking dynamics daylight

is far stronger than something like:

• A birthday or anniversary, such as 14031962. Dates are among the first things anyone would try, and they’re often easy to find online.
• A short password, such as Fluffy!23. Computers can try billions of short combinations very quickly.

Every extra word multiplies the number of guesses needed. A phrase of three or four unrelated words would take a computer an impossibly long time to stumble on, yet you can picture it in your head.

A few simple rules:

• Make it at least 12 characters long. Longer is better.
• Mix words that don’t usually go together.
• Don’t use a well-known quote, song lyric or the example on this page. Make up your own.
• Don’t reuse a password you already use anywhere else.

Final Note holds written notes, but you can include a video by uploading it to YouTube and pasting its link into your note. Here’s how.

1. Record your video on your phone or computer as you normally would.
2. Go to YouTube and sign in with a Google account. On a computer, visit studio.youtube.com. On a phone, open the YouTube app.
3. Start an upload. On a computer, click Create, then Upload videos. In the app, tap the + button, then Video.
4. Choose your video and give it a title. Something plain is best, so it draws no attention.
5. Set the visibility to “Unlisted”. This is the most important step. Look for the Visibility setting and pick Unlisted before you publish.
6. Copy the link. When the upload finishes, YouTube shows a link that looks like https://youtu.be/…. Copy it.
7. Paste the link into your Final Note before you seal it, with a line like “I recorded a video for you: …”.
8. Test it. Open the link in a private browser window, where you’re not signed in, to check it plays.

Why “Unlisted”, and not the other choices?

• Public: anyone in the world can find your video by searching YouTube. Not what you want for a personal message.
• Private: only people you invite by their Google account can watch it. If your loved one isn’t signed in with exactly that account, or you can’t predict which one they’ll use, they’ll see an error and the video won’t play.
• Unlisted: the video doesn’t show up in searches or on your channel, but anyone with the link can watch it, with no account needed. Since the link is sealed inside your note, the right person gets it at the right time.

Keep in mind: the link is locked inside your note, but the video itself lives on YouTube. Anyone who gets hold of the link some other way could watch it, so don’t share it anywhere else. Leave the video up, too: if it’s deleted, the link will stop working.