Terms

What Relay does

Relay stores information you choose to put in it, encrypted in your browser, and releases parts of it to people you designate when conditions you configure are met. You decide what is stored, who can reach it, and under what circumstances.

What Relay does not do

• It is not a legal instrument. It is not a will, a power of attorney, or a substitute for either, and it gives no one legal authority over your affairs. Relay does not offer estate or inheritance services — there is no death-verified handoff, no executor role, and nothing here transfers ownership of anything.
• It does not stop when you do. Relay releases access when the conditions you set are met, and one of those conditions is that you stop checking in. If you never check in again — for any reason — an armed release will open to the people you named, and it will stay open until someone closes it. Relay does not close it for you. That is the behaviour you are configuring. Name people accordingly.
• It does not bypass anyone else’s security. It organises access you already have the right to grant.
• It gives you recovery codes when you create your vault, and those are the only way back in if you lose your authenticator. Lose both and we cannot let you in — we can verify a recovery code, but we will not take anyone’s word for who they are.
• It offers no uptime guarantee. Keep a copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.

Your responsibilities

Only store information you are entitled to hold. If you set Relay up on behalf of someone else, do it with their knowledge and consent — the software records that consent and reports your activity to them, deliberately.

If someone names you

Someone can name you as a person who would receive access, or as someone who would be asked whether an emergency is real. When they do, they give you a code — read out, texted, or handed to you — and that code sets up a standby account in your name.

A standby account is free, and stays free. It holds no vault of its own and it is never billed — not to you, and not to the person who named you. If you also keep a vault of your own, standing by for other people uses none of its allowance. We will never send you a link that signs you in; if a message claiming to be Relay contains one, it is not from us.

Nothing is asked of you until something happens. Until then you can see that you are on standby and who for. If you would receive access, you can see how much was set aside for you and roughly what kind of thing it is — never the contents, and never before the conditions they set are met. If you would be asked to confirm an emergency, you are shown nothing about their vault until you are actually asked; at that moment you are told how many things are involved and what kinds, so you can judge whether what is being asked for is proportionate. You are never shown a title, and never the contents — not then, and not afterwards.

You can step down at any time, from your standby page, and you do not need a reason. The person who named you is told, so they can find someone else — that is the point of telling them, and it is why stepping down is not something we will do quietly on your behalf. If you close your account entirely, you are released from every circle you were part of and each of those people is told.

What you do in Relay is recorded in their log — when you accepted, when you answered, when you opened something. That is deliberate: it is how they know their plan is real. If you stand by for more than one person, none of them can learn about the others.

Text messaging is not switched on yet, and Relay has never sent one. These terms are published in advance, before carrier registration, so they can be read and checked before anything is sent. When it is switched on: you will be able to give us a mobile number, and we would text you only when something genuinely needs you — an emergency being raised, or a reminder that one is still waiting. The rule it will run under, which any opt-in screen has to implement: you turn this on yourself and nobody can turn it on for you, not even the person who named you; a number they typed in is there to help them reach you, never used by us for texts. Reply STOP to any message and it ends, or HELP to reach us. Standard message and data rates apply, and how often you hear from us depends entirely on what happens. As with email, we will never text you a link that signs you in. The current status is always on /sms.

Payment and renewal

Relay costs $119 per year in US dollars for a vault of your own. You are never charged without going through checkout yourself, and there is a free tier you can stay on indefinitely. Standby accounts, described above, are free and are not part of this.

A subscription renews automatically every year at $119 until you cancel it, and the card you paid with is charged on each renewal date. Payments are processed by Stripe; we never see or store your card details.

You can cancel at any time from the Subscription section of your account page, which opens Stripe’s billing page — the same place you can update your card or read past invoices. Cancelling stops all future charges. Closing your account cancels the subscription too, so you never need to do both.

30-day money-back guarantee. If Relay is not what you expected, email hello@relaystandby.com within 30 days of a charge — including a renewal charge — and we will refund it in full. After that window we do not refund the unused part of a year, though you can cancel at any time to stop the next one. Nothing here removes a refund right the law gives you.

Ending it

You can close your account yourself, at any time, from your account page — it deletes your vault and cancels any subscription in the same step. You can export everything first. We may discontinue the service, and if we do we will give notice and a way to export what you have stored.

Ending a subscription never deletes anything. Your vault stays exactly as it is; the free-tier limits apply only to adding more.

A lapsed subscription does not switch off the part that matters. If you stop paying, you can no longer start a release yourself from inside Relay. But everything that happens without you still happens: if you stop checking in, if someone asks for access and you agree, or if you are asked and never answer, your plan runs exactly as you configured it. We will not hold an emergency behind a card.

Closing your account also releases you from anyone else’s plan you were standing by for, and tells them so. We do not remove you from their list on your behalf — their record of you stays, marked as no longer set up, so their plan gets weaker visibly rather than silently.

Liability

Relay is provided as-is, without warranties. To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from its use.

Who provides Relay, and how to reach him

Relay is provided by Steve Harlow, an individual — there is no company. These terms are an agreement between you and him.

If you stop paying, nothing is deleted. When a subscription ends your account returns to the free plan and your vault stays exactly as it is — the items, the people you named, and the arrangements between them. What the free plan changes is what you can add: it holds fewer items, so if you are above that number you will not be able to add new ones until you either remove some or start a plan again. Reading, editing and exporting what is already there are not affected, and neither is anyone’s ability to reach you in an emergency.

There is no successor and no escrow. If Relay stops being operated, the service stops, and a stopped service cannot release access to anyone you named. Your content is not at risk — vault items are encrypted in your browser and he cannot read them — but the service that would open them would be gone. Export your vault from Account; it decrypts in your browser and writes a file you keep, and it is the only copy that survives Relay ending. A deliberate wind-down would be announced with time to do that, which is an intention rather than a guarantee, because a guarantee would need someone other than him to enforce it. See /about.

hello@relaystandby.com — read by a person. More at about.