What happens if we go away
You are being asked to trust a website with the last thing you will ever say to the people you love. Services like this one have closed before, quietly, and the people who trusted them found out afterwards or not at all. So here is exactly what we commit to, in plain words. Every one of these is also written into the Terms, because a promise a contract can override is only marketing.
If we ever decide to stop, every account holding a scheduled letter or post gets an email at least a year before anything closes. Not a banner somebody has to be signed in to see. An email, to the address on the account.
Before the service closes we make every reasonable effort to send everything already written, including letters whose date has not yet arrived. Closing down is not a reason for a letter to go undelivered.
There is a button in your settings that downloads everything you have written as a single file you keep on your own device. It does not depend on us existing, and you do not have to wait for bad news to use it.
The Terms used to reserve the right to stop serving you if doing so stopped being commercially viable. We took that clause out. It is the precise reason comparable services have closed on the people who trusted them, and it has no place in an agreement about somebody's last words.
A buyer either takes on the obligation to deliver your scheduled letters on the dates you chose, or those letters are delivered or returned to you before the sale completes. A change of ownership is the most common way a service like this quietly stops keeping its word.
Each commitment above is written into the agreement itself, under Ending the Service in the Terms, and in the change of ownership section of the Privacy Policy. If this page and those documents ever disagree, the documents are what bind us, so we keep them in step deliberately.
Goodbye App is a small independent company, running since 2021, and the service is free. There is no advertising, nothing is sold to data brokers, and there is no investor waiting for an exit. That is why the commitments above are ones we can actually keep.