Terms of Service

§1 What TimeLink is

TimeLink is a message delivery service. You can send a letter, photo, voice message or video now, schedule one for a future date, set one to repeat on the same date each year, or leave one to be released after your death has been confirmed. Because of the nature of this service, please read these Terms carefully.

In other words: TimeLink sends your messages — today, on a date you choose, every year, or after you have died. Because of that last part, these Terms are worth reading properly.

§2 Eligibility and your account

You must be at least 18 and able to enter into a binding agreement to hold a TimeLink account. The information you give us must be accurate, and you are responsible for what happens under your account.

Because TimeLink may deliver your messages years from now, you agree to keep the details of the people you write to, and of your Assigned Contacts, up to date. A message can only reach an address that still works.

In other words: You need to be an adult, tell us the truth, look after your account, and keep your people’s email addresses current.

§3 Scheduled, recurring and event messages

There are three kinds of message:

• Dated — sent once, on a calendar date you choose.
• Recurring — sent every year on the same date.
• Event — written for a day nobody can put in a diary, such as a wedding or the birth of a first child.

Event messages are never sent while you are alive. They are sent when your passing is confirmed, together with everything else you have held, each carrying a label naming the occasion it was written for — for example, “to be opened on your wedding day”. The label is an instruction to the person receiving it, not a lock. The message is theirs from the moment it arrives, and TimeLink does not prevent it being opened before the day.

A recurring message is sent every year on its date until you delete it. It has no end date, and it continues after your death.

In other words: A message can go out once, every year, or — for a wedding or a first child — after you have died, marked for the day it was meant for. That mark is a request, not a seal.

§4 Check-ins and how death is confirmed

This section is still being written.

In other words: to follow, with the text.

§5 Your Assigned Contacts

An Assigned Contact has one duty: to tell TimeLink that you have passed away. That is the whole of it. When the time comes, they answer one email.

You name at least two — a primary and a secondary — so the confirmation still happens if the first cannot give it. We ask your primary first. If they decline, or do not answer within two weeks, we ask your secondary, and so on down your list.

An Assigned Contact is never asked to hold messages, remember dates, send anything later, choose what is sent or to whom, or judge whether anything should have been written. They are not your executor and have no authority over your account or your estate.

Your Assigned Contact never sees what you have written. They see only who has something waiting and how many things.

If your check-ins go unanswered, we ask your first Assigned Contact whether you have passed away or are fine. If they confirm your passing, we wait 72 hours and email you; signing in during that time stops everything. Only then is what you have held sent. We do not ask for a death certificate or any other document.

You confirm that each person you name has agreed to it and understands what it involves. What we tell them is published at timelinklife.com/assigned-contact.

In other words: Your Assigned Contacts do one thing: tell us when you have died. Name two, ask them first, and know they never see what you wrote.

§6 The people you write to

This section is still being written.

In other words: to follow, with the text.

§7 Your content, and the licence you give us

Everything you write, record and upload stays yours. You give TimeLink a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable licence to store it, process it and deliver it as you instruct — and nothing more. We do not use it to promote TimeLink, and we do not change it.

The licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for anything already delivered, which belongs to the person who received it.

In other words: It’s yours. We only hold it and send it where you tell us to.

§8 Privacy, encryption and AI

Your messages and files are encrypted while they travel and while they are stored. They are not end-to-end encrypted: the people at TimeLink with administrator access to our systems could technically open them.

TimeLink does not use anything you write, record or upload to train AI models.

If you use one of TimeLink’s AI features — help with a letter, the quote of the day, or the help chat — the text that feature needs is sent to Anthropic, the company that provides the AI, to produce a reply. Nothing is sent unless you use the feature.

Our Privacy Policy describes all of this in full.

In other words: Your messages are protected but not end-to-end encrypted, we never train AI on them, and the AI features only see what you give them.

§9 Keepsakes

Keepsakes are things you keep in TimeLink rather than send — a voicemail, a photograph, a recording. You can choose someone to pass each one on to.

They are governed the same way as messages. When your passing is confirmed, each keepsake you have chosen someone for is sent to them, along with everything else. If you delete your account, your keepsakes are deleted with it.

In other words: Keepsakes follow the same rules as messages, including when you die.

§10 Delivery is not guaranteed

We make every reasonable effort to deliver what you send, when you asked us to. But TimeLink delivers by email, over years, and some things are outside our control. We cannot guarantee that:

• a message arrives at a particular time of day — it is sent on the day, not to the minute;
• a recipient’s email provider will not filter it as spam;
• an email address will still work when the day comes;
• the services we rely on will always be available;
• every device will play every photo, video or recording format.

In other words: We will try hard to get every message there, on the day. Email being what it is, we can’t promise it will always work.

§11 Payment, pauses and lapses

This section is still being written.

In other words: to follow, with the text.

§12 Billing stops when delivery is complete

Once your messages have gone out, billing stops. We close the subscription ourselves. Nobody in your family has to call us to cancel anything.

In other words: When everything has been sent, we stop charging. Your family doesn’t have to do a thing.

§13 Taking everything with you

You can download everything in your account at any time, from Settings, under Download everything. You get a single ZIP file containing:

• every letter, as a plain text (TXT) file;
• every photo, video and voice recording, in the format you uploaded it in;
• your family tree, as a spreadsheet (CSV);
• all of it together as structured data (JSON).

These open without TimeLink.

In other words: Download all of it, whenever you like, in ordinary files.

§14 If TimeLink closes or changes hands

This section is still being written.

In other words: to follow, with the text.

§15 How long we keep things

We keep your account and everything in it until you delete it, or delete your account. Deleting your account removes everything, at once.

A delivered message stays open to the person it was sent to, through its private link, for as long as your account exists. The link does not expire. It stops working only if you delete that message or your account.

In other words: Your things are kept until you delete them. What you send stays open to the person who got it.

§16 Dormant accounts

Silence on its own never sends anything. If you stop answering check-ins, we ask your Assigned Contact — we do not treat an inactive account as a death.

In other words: Going quiet doesn’t release your messages. Only a confirmation does.

§17 Acceptable use

Don’t use TimeLink to:

• break the law, or help anyone else to;
• threaten, harass or deceive the people you write to;
• send anything that sexualises a child;
• share private images or recordings of someone without the right to;
• pretend to be someone you are not;
• send malware, or try to get into anyone else’s account.

Nothing you write, record or upload is scanned automatically. If we learn that content breaks these rules, we may remove it, and we will tell you why unless doing so would put someone at risk. We do not remove content for any other reason.

In other words: Don’t use TimeLink to hurt anyone. We don’t scan your things, and we only remove something if it breaks these rules.

§18 Not a will, and not advice

A TimeLink message is a message. It is not a will, a trust or any other legal instrument, and it carries no legal weight on its own. Nothing in TimeLink replaces or changes your estate documents, and using TimeLink creates no professional or fiduciary relationship between you and us. If you want something to be legally binding, talk to an estate attorney.

In other words: TimeLink sits beside your will, not instead of it.

§19 Disclaimers, liability and indemnity

This section is still being written.

In other words: to follow, with the text.

§20 Changes, governing law and disputes

This section is still being written.

In other words: to follow, with the text.

§21 Gifts and the shops we link to

This section is still being written.

In other words: to follow, with the text.