The Economics of Running a Digital Legacy Service

Building a digital legacy service comes with a constraint most startups don't have: we need to outlive our users. That's not marketing speak—it's the fundamental promise. If we optimize for rapid scaling and burn through VC money chasing growth, we might not be around when your family actually needs us. So we built Inheritfy to be profitable from day one, with transparent costs and sustainable margins. Here's exactly how the economics work.

What It Actually Costs to Run This

Our infrastructure runs almost entirely on AWS. The backend is a Go application on App Runner (about $10-15/month at low traffic), with the frontend and marketing site served through CloudFront and S3 for another $1-2/month. We use Neon's serverless PostgreSQL, which starts on their free tier and scales to around $19/month as we grow. Email goes through AWS SES at roughly $0.10 per thousand messages. Add in Route 53 for DNS, KMS for encryption key management, and miscellaneous costs, and we're looking at $15-25/month total at current scale.

That's intentionally lean. We chose CloudFront over App Runner for static content because it's 10x cheaper and actually faster. We use serverless PostgreSQL because it scales to zero during quiet periods—no point paying for a database that's sitting idle at 3 AM.

The Storage Math

S3 pricing looks simple at $0.023 per gigabyte per month, but the real cost depends on access patterns. Most files in a digital legacy vault are write-once, read-rarely. You upload documents today; your family downloads them once after verification, maybe twice. That's it.

So we optimize aggressively. Files start in S3 Standard at $0.023/GB, then automatically transition to S3 Infrequent Access at $0.0125/GB after 90 days. For Time Capsules—messages scheduled years into the future—we move files to Glacier Deep Archive after just 30 days, dropping storage costs to $0.00099/GB. That's essentially free for long-term storage. When a capsule's delivery date approaches, we restore the files 12-48 hours in advance, which is plenty of time for scheduled deliveries.

Run the numbers on a 1GB vault: three months at Standard pricing ($0.069), then nine months at Infrequent Access ($0.113), totaling about $0.18 per year. The Starter plan includes 1GB for $48/year. The remaining $47.82 covers compute, email, support, and—crucially—the obligation to keep this service running for decades. That margin isn't greed; it's sustainability.

Grace Periods: Expensive but Essential

Here's a decision that doesn't make pure economic sense: if your payment fails, we don't immediately delete your data or stop the check-in system. We keep operating your account for 30 days on Starter, 90 days on Premium, and 180 days on Legacy.

During that time, we're paying for storage and compute with zero revenue. A Legacy user with 50GB of files costs us about $0.63/month in storage alone, plus their share of compute. Multiply by 180 days, and a single grace-period user could cost us $10-15 before they either resume paying or we can safely archive their data.

We do this anyway because the alternative is worse. If you're in a coma and your card expires, your family still needs access to your vault. If you die and your bank account gets frozen during probate, the verification system still needs to work. Protecting your legacy matters more than payment status. This is what "sustainable business" actually means for a service like ours—the mission has to come before pure profit optimization.

Verification Costs

When someone misses check-ins, we don't just flip a switch. The verification process involves multiple notifications: reminder emails to the user, alerts to trustees, escalation emails to beneficiaries. Email is cheap—about $0.0001 per message through SES. The expensive part is SMS.

Twilio charges roughly $0.0079 per outbound SMS in the US, more for international numbers. A Legacy user with 10 trustees receiving SMS notifications at each escalation stage can run up several dollars per verification cycle. This is why SMS notifications are only available on Premium and Legacy plans—we can absorb that cost at those price points, but not at $4/month.

Why AWS Instead of Cheaper Alternatives

We could save 30-40% running on Hetzner or DigitalOcean. We specifically chose not to, for reasons that matter more than monthly savings.

S3 offers 99.999999999% durability—that's eleven nines. AWS has SOC 2 compliance, HIPAA eligibility, and GDPR-ready infrastructure out of the box. Their KMS provides hardware-backed encryption key management. And perhaps most importantly: AWS isn't going anywhere. When we promise your files will be accessible in 20 years, we're betting on AWS's infrastructure durability. Smaller providers get acquired, pivot, or shut down. AWS is boring and reliable, which is exactly what you want for a service holding your family's most important documents.

The extra cost is insurance. That's worth a few dollars per month.

Why We Don't Chase "Cheapest"

We could charge $1/month and try to make it up on volume. Here's why that would be dangerous for a service like ours.

Race-to-bottom pricing attracts price-sensitive customers who often don't value the service enough to maintain it long-term. High churn means constantly paying acquisition costs instead of building lasting relationships. If we make $0.50/user/month, we need tens of thousands of users just to cover infrastructure. That pressure leads to desperate moves—selling data, cutting security corners, or shutting down entirely when growth stalls.

Worst of all, at $1/month, a 90-day grace period would wipe out years of revenue from that user. We'd have to eliminate the very features that make a legacy service trustworthy.

Our pricing ($4-19/month) ensures profitability at small scale. We don't need 10,000 users to survive—100 committed users makes this sustainable. That's the kind of business that can exist for decades without outside pressure to "grow or die."

Where Your Money Goes

About 15-20% of subscription revenue goes to infrastructure: AWS compute, storage, networking, email. Another 3-4% goes to Stripe for payment processing (2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction). We set aside roughly 10% as a grace period reserve—money to cover users who stop paying but whose data we're still obligated to maintain. Development and maintenance takes about 30%: security updates, new features, bug fixes. Support runs around 10%. The remaining 25-30% is operating margin.

That margin isn't excessive. It's the difference between a service that can weather a recession and one that folds when times get tough. For a legacy service, survivability isn't a feature; it's the entire product.

Why I'm Not Worried About Longevity

Here's something that might matter more than any business plan: I use Inheritfy myself. My own family's documents are in here. The service existing long-term isn't just a business goal—it's personal.

And because we built it lean, the economics work in your favor. At $15-25/month for infrastructure, I can keep this running indefinitely out of pocket if I had to. No customers? Still runs. Business slows down? Still runs. That's the point of building something sustainable instead of something that requires constant growth to survive.

You can also export everything anytime—SSE vaults download as decrypted files, CSE vaults export encrypted with your key. No lock-in. If you use client-side encryption, you have your 24-word recovery phrase, which means you can reconstruct your master key and decrypt your files locally even without us. But I don't expect you'll need to.

The Bottom Line

Running a digital legacy service isn't about minimizing costs—it's about maximizing trustworthiness. Every technical decision we make asks: Will this still work in 20 years? Can we afford to maintain this indefinitely? Does this compromise our users' security for short-term savings?

The answer to sustainable pricing is straightforward: infrastructure costs plus a buffer for reliability, plus grace period reserves, plus development and support, plus enough margin to survive downturns. That formula produces prices that won't win "cheapest" comparisons, but it produces a service you can actually trust with your legacy.

And that trust is the only thing that matters.