How Free works
How the Free plan works — and what we commit to
Published July 13, 2026
The Free plan needs no card and no payment. There is one requirement: sign in at least once every 36 months, so we know the account is still wanted. Miss that window and the account is soft-locked — access pauses, but your documents and recipient designations are preserved, and you can reactivate. Paid plans don't have this requirement.
You've seen the pattern. A service launches with a generous free tier, you sign up and build a routine around it, and a few years later the rules quietly change. The free tier shrinks. New limits appear. Old features move behind a paywall. Sometimes a single email — “we're making important updates to our pricing” — is the only warning.
We didn't want SLDocs to ever have that conversation with you. So we designed the Free tier from day one with that future-conversation in mind — and we're committing in writing to the terms below.
Why the Free plan stays inexpensive to run
Generous free tiers usually shrink for one reason: per-user cost grows faster than the company can absorb. We designed the Free tier specifically to keep that math from applying to us.
- Storage cost per Free account is small and shrinking. Six encrypted documents typically total a few megabytes. Cloud storage prices have declined every year for the past decade and continue to. The per-user cost of running a Free account today is fractions of a cent per month; ten years from now it will be smaller still.
- No bandwidth-heavy features on Free. The Free tier doesn't include fax delivery, mass downloads, wellness-check messaging, or family-group invitations. It does what an estate document vault fundamentally needs to do — hold documents securely and make them available to one designated recipient when they're needed. Nothing more.
- No support-cost growth on Free. Free accounts don't generate the high-touch interactions that drive support cost — no recipient access requests, no family management, no add-on troubleshooting.
- The cap stays fixed; the cost to support it keeps falling. Because the limits don't grow, our per-user cost only declines over time as infrastructure prices do. Keeping the Free plan available is inexpensive for us — by design.
What we commit to
1. We don't delete your documents.
If you stop paying, lapse, or simply walk away for years, your uploaded documents stay encrypted in storage — restorable by reactivating the account. We only delete documents when you ask us to.
2. You can always get your documents out.
Export your own documents at any time. And if SLDocs ever winds down, we will give meaningful notice and a documented export path, so nothing is ever stranded.
3. No silent changes to Free.
If we ever change the Free tier, we will tell every existing Free user clearly and in advance — what is changing and when. We will not bury it in a release note.
What we don't promise
An honest list of what this pledge does not cover, so we're clear with each other.
- We do not promise the Free tier will always look the same for new accounts. If our cost structure changes materially, future Free signups might see different terms. Your existing account is unaffected.
- We do not promise to add new features to the Free tier. New capabilities may be added to paid tiers only.
- We do not promise to never show upgrade prompts. We may recommend paid plans where they're a fit. We will never withhold features you already had under your existing terms.
- We do not promise SLDocs will exist forever. If we ever shut down, we will give meaningful notice and a documented export path. We'll describe those terms in our forthcoming Terms of Service.
If we ever break this
We won't, but you deserve to know what would happen if we did.
The commitments above are published representations. Under U.S. consumer-protection law (FTC Section 5 and state UDAP statutes), that means they are binding on us as a matter of consumer protection law even before they appear in a formal Terms of Service. When our Terms of Service are finalized, this pledge will be incorporated by reference so the commitments also become contractual terms.
If you believe we've modified an existing Free account's terms in a way that contradicts this page, email legal@sldocs.com and reference this pledge. We will respond.
Please don't email sensitive personal or health information or documents — email isn't encrypted and may be stored outside the U.S. Use your in-product vault instead.
See also: our company story, the full pricing breakdown, and the third parties we use to deliver the service.