Who is behind Relay
Relay asks you to trust it with the accounts that matter most to your family. You should know who is asking.
One person, named
Relay is built and operated by Steve Harlow. Not a company — an individual. There is no team behind the word “we”, so this page does not use it.
That is worth being plain about rather than dressing up. Independent software has real limits, and they are set out in the Terms and on the security page, including the honest answer to what happens to your vault if Relay stops existing.
Why it exists
Most families handle this the only way they know how: one person keeps everything, and if that person is suddenly unreachable, nobody else can get in. The usual fix is to share the passwords — which works right up until it doesn’t, and cannot be undone.
Relay exists because the reverse should be possible: access that opens only when people you trust confirm something real has happened, gives out only what you chose in advance, and seals itself again when you check back in. Setting it up should not require deciding to give anything away permanently.
What happens to Relay if something happens to me
This product is about the day somebody cannot act. It would be a poor answer to that question to avoid it about myself, so: Relay is run by one person, and there is no company behind me, no co-founder, and no arrangement with anybody to take it over.
If I stopped — and the bills stopped being paid — the service would stop with me. A stopped service cannot release anything to anyone. Nobody you have named would be given access, because the thing that gives them access is the thing that is gone. I would rather write that plainly than let it be discovered.
What is not at risk is your content. Vault items are encrypted in your browser, and I could not read them on my best day. So the failure above is a loss of service, not a leak — and the same design means I could not hand your vault to a successor even if there were one.
The thing you can do about it takes one click and needs nothing from me. Under Account there is an export. It decrypts your whole vault in your own browser and writes it to a file you keep. Do it once and you are holding a copy that outlives Relay, me, and your subscription. If you only ever act on one sentence from this page, that is the one.
If Relay is ever wound down deliberately rather than abruptly, you will hear it from this address with time to export. That is an intention, and I am not dressing it up as a guarantee — a guarantee would need somebody other than me to enforce it, and there is nobody.
Reaching a human
hello@relaystandby.com reaches Steve directly. It is read by a person, not a queue, and it is the right address for support, security reports, refunds and press. You will hear back within one business day.
That is one person’s honest commitment on a bad week, not a promise that sounds better on a good one. If something is actively going wrong with a release, say so in the subject line and it goes to the top.
Writing about family caregiving or digital access and want to ask something? Same address.