Most estate plans are fine. The attorney knew what she was doing, the signing went the way it was supposed to, and the documents would hold up in front of any judge in the state. Then somebody has a stroke and the daughter driving in from Ohio does not know whether there is a healthcare directive, let alone where it is kept. None of that has anything to do with the quality of the legal work.
Archively is built for that gap. The company makes the point to attorneys on its partner page about as plainly as it can be made: “Estate plans don’t usually fail on paper. They fail at the moment they’re needed.”
Digital vaults are not new, and most of them are a folder with a login screen. What makes this one worth writing about is the architecture, a three part setup the company calls secur3 and says it has a patent pending on.
How secur3 works
Files get encrypted with AES-256-GCM in the browser, before anything is transmitted, using a key derived from your account. Archively says it never sees the plaintext and never holds that key. GCM is an authenticated mode, so a tampered file fails loudly instead of quietly decrypting into garbage. Everybody in this market says zero knowledge and usually it just means the support staff has been told not to look.
Then the encrypted file goes to Arweave.
That is the part that matters and it is the part nobody explains well. Arweave is a decentralized storage network that pays storage providers up front to keep replicating data over the long term, which is a different arrangement entirely than renting space by the month. The Archively engineering blog puts it in one line: “There is no shut down the bucket button.” No region gets deprecated out from under you, and there is no acquisition that ends with the product being sunset on ninety days notice. Whether that matters depends on how long the documents need to survive, and for estate documents the honest answer is decades.
Every upload also mints an NFT on Polygon carrying the hash of the file, the owner, a timestamp, and encryption metadata. That transaction hash is the receipt, and anyone can check it, even after the company is gone.
The token is not the document
This trips up a lot of people. The token does not contain the will. A hash is one way, meaning you can run the file through it and get the string but you cannot run the string backward and get the file. What the token proves is that a file with that exact fingerprint existed at that exact moment and belonged to that person. Change a single comma in the will and it stops matching. The document itself stays on Arweave.
Which is worth something specific in probate. Somebody claims the signature page was swapped, or that the accounting got assembled three months late to paper over a transfer nobody can explain. Those fights are miserable, mostly because the evidence that would end them never existed. Here it gets created on upload, incidentally, before anyone knew there was going to be a fight.
Keep the paper, though. A digital copy still is not the executed original will, and most states want the original filed before they will open probate. And a timestamp proves less than people think, since it establishes only that a document existed on a date and says nothing about whether the contents are accurate or whether the person signing understood what he was signing.
How this compares to the other places people keep estate documents
Worth being clear about something. Every option below is a real product that works, and each one was built to solve a particular problem. The differences are about what job the thing was designed for, not about quality.
A safe deposit box is the traditional answer and it is very good at surviving a house fire. What it was never designed for is access after death, when the box generally cannot be opened without a court order or a supervised visit, which is exactly the moment the family needs the will.
General cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive is excellent at what it does, which is letting you reach your own files from anywhere while you are alive. It was not built around death or incapacity, so the provider usually requires a court order before releasing a deceased account to family.
Purpose built estate organizers such as Everplans and the digital vault bundled into Trust and Will are genuinely well designed for this category, and they solve the organization problem properly with structured checklists and designated access. They run on conventional hosting and annual subscriptions, which is a completely normal way to build software, it just means the documents live wherever the vendor lives.
Archively sits in that last group but takes a different approach to the storage layer. Documents go to a decentralized network rather than to company servers, and each upload gets an independent blockchain record. Whether that difference is worth anything to you depends entirely on your time horizon and how much you care about a record that can be verified without the vendor being involved.
We plan to look at several of these platforms individually in future posts.
What it costs
Essential is thirty five dollars a month, no activation fee, 1GB of storage, three family members and one professional. Family is one hundred dollars a month plus a one hundred fifty dollar activation, which moves you to ten family members, five professionals, unlimited photos and five video messages. Estate is two hundred seventy five plus four hundred fifty, adding unlimited video, unlimited designations and advanced release workflows. Legacy runs twelve hundred a month plus twenty one hundred activation and is currently waitlisted. Extra storage costs one hundred fifty to unlock and twenty dollars a month per 5GB after that.
Prepayment shows up as an upgrade called Legacy Continuity, which is a completely different thing than Archively Continuity, the feature that releases your documents to designated people at a moment you set in advance. Confusing name to have picked. The discount is twenty five percent off at five years and thirty five percent at ten, and you can upload one document free without handing over a card.
Every plan lists the same AES-256-GCM encryption, so what you are buying as you move up is room, more designated people, and more elaborate rules about when things get released.
What to put in it
The will, the trust, powers of attorney, the healthcare directive and the HIPAA release go in without anyone needing to be told.
The ones people forget are duller and more useful, and that is the deed, the insurance policies, a list of what accounts exist and who holds them, funeral instructions, and a note in plain language saying where everything else is. Archively will also hold recorded video messages until a date you set, which is not document storage at all, and less people offer it than you would expect.
The Estate Risk Calculator on the Archively site puts typical probate cost at three to seven percent of estate value. On a six hundred thousand dollar estate that is somewhere between eighteen thousand and forty two thousand dollars.
Two notes, depending on who you are
Attorneys have their own version of this. Archively runs an Attorney Partner Program built on the argument that a plan only works if the family can execute it, and firms that sign on keep their workflow exactly as it is while getting client explainers, suggested engagement letter language, and recurring revenue tied to continuing client care.
For whoever ends up serving as executor, guardian or conservator, the thing to know is that a court wants the will, a certified death certificate, the petition, and a workable estimate of what the estate is worth before it will issue letters, because that last figure is what the fiduciary bond gets set on. In most states the bond runs on personal property and anticipated income rather than the full gross estate, so the house usually does not drive the number the way people expect it to. Gathering all of that is the part of the timeline you actually control. If a bond has already been ordered, you can get a probate bond quote. Guardians and conservators comparing case management tools may also want to look at guardianship software reviews.
Where to find Archively
Website: archively.com/
Attorney Partner Program: archively.com/attorney-partners.html
Estate Risk Calculator: archively.com/estate-risk-calculator
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/archivelyapp/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/archivelyapp
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@archivelyapp
FindEstatePlanning.org is a free directory of estate planning attorneys and local estate planning events, presented by ProbateCourtBond.com. Listings are informational only and do not imply endorsement, and no attorney-client relationship is formed. This article is an independent review based on publicly available information from the company website. It is not an endorsement and we do not vouch for any product or service described. Archively did not pay for, sponsor, or review this article. Pricing and features were accurate as of September 2026 and are subject to change. Nothing here is legal advice, and probate procedure and document requirements vary by state.