FAQs

Shelter is a secure digital vault for storing your accounts, assets, and more that your loved ones will need to know when there’s an emergency or after you die.

You can invite Trusted Contacts to your Shelter, who can access and see the important information you save. You can control whether your Trusted Contacts can see your Shelter immediately or only after you’ve died.

A Trusted Contact is a person you invite to have access to your Shelter. They cannot update the items in your Shelter, but they can see everything at the appropriate time.

No, they do not. When you invite a Trusted Contact, you can either give them immediate access or “timed access”. With timed access, your Trusted Contact requests access to your Shelter. If you have not responded within a number of days you set – likely because of death or incapacitation – they are given access to your Shelter.

Yes. Shelter’s platform is built upon a zero-knowledge architecture, meaning that we can’t see, access, or decrypt your encrypted Shelter items. You and your Trusted Contacts are the only people who hold the key to decrypt what’s in your Shelter.

Shelter costs $99 per year. There’s no additional charge for your Trusted Contacts to access your Shelter.

Shelter organizes your vault into 5 folders: Finances, Physical Assets, Digital Assets, Legal & Wills, and Personal, Family & Community. Each folder has subcategories for suggested items to store, such as access to social media accounts, telephones, 401(k) plans, and more.

Register for a Shelter account here.

Login to your Shelter here.

Navigate to a folder in your Shelter, choose a subcategory, and click the appropriate “Add” button. You’ll be presented with a screen to name your item and add all of the relevant details.

Absolutely! Use the “Add Attachment” button to upload any files or screenshots to accompany the items in your Shelter.

Navigate to the “Trusted contacts” page in your Shelter, and click the “Add contact” button. Enter their Name and Email to invite them to your Shelter.

Your Trusted Contact will receive an email inviting them to your Shelter. They’ll need to click the link in the email and accept the invitation. Once they accept the invitation, you’ll get notified. The final step requires you to “Confirm” them as a Trusted Contact, and set up their Timed Access if need be.

Yes! After a Trusted Contact has been invited, accepted, or confirmed, you can remove their access. Simply click the three dots next to their name on the Trusted Contacts screen and choose “Revoke”. If you want to change a confirmed Trusted Contacts’ access from Timed to Immediate (or vice-versa), click the three dots next to their name and choose “Change Access”.

Yes, absolutely! Click into any item you’ve added to your Shelter and you’ll get a screen to edit its details. When you edit an item in your Shelter, its “Last Updated” date will display when viewing the category.

Your master password secures everything that you add to your Shelter vault before it gets sent to our servers, and the only thing that can decrypt it is your master password.

The items in your Shelter vault are stored as encrypted text that can only be decrypted and read by you and your Trusted Contacts.

No. The staff at Shelter cannot read the items in your Shelter; only you and your Trusted Contacts have the key to decrypt what you’ve stored. We cannot read what’s in your Shelter.

We are deeply committed to protecting your data. In a worst case scenario where Shelter’s server were hacked, the attacker would only get the encrypted version of your data and it would still be protected by our strong AES-256 encryption, which would be unreadable without knowing your password.

Shelter uses the same architecture and security best practices as top password managers.

Yes. In order to access your Shelter, you will be prompted to enter a code sent to your email or from your chosen Authenticator application.

Because you have invited and confirmed them, your Trusted Contacts are able to decrypt and view the items in your Shelter.

Your Shelter can be accessed by your Trusted Contacts. Your Shelter will stay open until your subscription ends, followed by a one year grace period. If your Trusted Contact wants to take over the account to renew it, they can add their credit card and extended the subscription.

Yes! Even though all of your data is encrypted and we can’t even read it, we still delete it from our servers once your subscription and the grace year period end.

You must have your Recovery Code (provided to you when you Register) in order to reset your password.

The only way to reset your password is to use your Recovery Code (provided to you when you Register). Our employees cannot reset it for you because they simply don’t have the ability to due to our Zero Knowledge architecture.

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Please reach out to us via the Support form.

Please reach out to us via the Support form and we’ll help you as quickly as possible.