The honest answer
It's not a fun question, but it deserves an honest answer — and the honest answer is: mostly, nothing happens. Accounts don't close themselves. Subscriptions keep billing. Photos sit in a cloud nobody can open. Email piles up. And the people you love are left guessing at passwords at the worst possible moment to be solving puzzles.
The average person now has more than a hundred online accounts, and few of us have told anyone what they are — let alone how to reach them. Here's what actually happens to your accounts, and a short, concrete plan that makes it easier for the people you'd leave behind. None of it requires a particular app. It's simply what a prepared digital life looks like.
The default
Accounts drift. Families guess.
There's no master switch. Each company only finds out separately — usually when a family member tells them, with paperwork — so until then, everything keeps running on autopilot.
Streaming, storage, memberships, software — billed to the card on file until someone cancels. Executors find them on statements months later.
Bank statements, bills, renewal notices, password resets — piling up in an inbox nobody can open.
Providers can't simply hand them over on request — privacy rules protect the account even after its owner has passed.
Some platforms close inactive accounts on a timer — Google may delete after roughly two years of inactivity, photos included.
Without access, a family is left with the formal route: death certificates, notarized requests, sometimes court orders — a months-long process with no guarantee, because in many cases the law genuinely won't let the company open the account. The difference between that and a calm handover is entirely in the preparation.
The master key
Your email opens everything else
If you plan for only one account, make it your email. Nearly every other account resets its password through it — whoever can open your inbox can, with patience, reach almost everything else. Your phone number is the second key, since so many verification codes land there.
So the fate of your entire digital life mostly comes down to whether the right person can reach one inbox and one phone number — and the wrong people can't.
Built-in tools
Tools the big platforms already built
A few major platforms quietly built exactly the right thing — and almost nobody switches it on. Each takes about five minutes.
Choose trusted contacts and exactly what they receive — Gmail, Photos, Drive — after your account goes quiet for a period you set.
A designated person can request access to your iCloud data — photos included — with an access key and a death certificate.
A legacy contact can manage a memorialized profile — or you can choose to have the account deleted instead.
They're genuinely good — and genuinely incomplete: one platform at a time, and most services (including nearly every bank) offer nothing self-serve at all. For everything else, what your family needs most is simpler — knowing the account exists.
The legal reality
Can't they just use my passwords?
In plain terms: logging into someone else's account — even a late spouse's — generally violates the platform's terms of service, and in many places runs afoul of computer-access and privacy laws. In the US, most states have adopted a law (RUFADAA) that lets your executor reach digital assets if you authorized it — through a platform's own tool or in your will or estate documents. Details vary by country; this isn't legal advice.
The takeaway is belt-and-suspenders: switch on the platform tools, name digital access explicitly in your estate documents, and leave organized, secure access so nobody has to improvise.
The plan
The 15-minute plan
You don't need to catalogue your whole digital life. You need five things — and the first pass takes about fifteen minutes.
Do these five things and you've spared your family the guessing, the support tickets, and the quiet loss of things that mattered — the photos, the letters, the records of a life.
Ten questions, about two minutes — see your readiness score and exactly where the gaps are.
Take the free digital-estate quiz
Where Simply Once fits
We built Simply Once around exactly this problem: one encrypted place for the accounts, documents, and details that make up your life — organized once, kept current, and shared only with the people you choose. Trusted emergency access means the right person gets exactly what they need, when it matters; zero-knowledge encryption means nobody else — including us — can ever read what's inside.
If you never use Simply Once, do the five steps anyway — they're what count. If you'd like one calm place to do them in, that's what we're for. And if you're already on the other side of this — settling a parent's affairs — start with how to access a deceased parent's accounts.
Part of our guide to organizing your family's important information →