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How WillSignal works

WillSignal is a dead man’s switch for personal messages. You write messages for the people you choose and keep your signal lit by checking in. If your signal ever goes out, those messages are delivered to them inside the app — and not a moment before.

WillSignal delivers final messages: personal words, not legal documents. It is not a will in the legal sense, and it never claims to verify that anyone has died. It acts on your signal, and on nothing else.

1

Write what you would want them to have

A message is something you can keep shaping for as long as your signal remains lit. Edit it, add to it, or take it back entirely.

It can be anything you would want to leave behind in words: a final letter, a goodbye you hope is never needed, or a thank-you you have never quite said aloud. Nothing about it is final while your signal is lit.

Saving a message makes it ready, and a ready message is delivered when your signal goes out. If that is not what you want yet, choose Save draft instead. A draft is never delivered, even with its receivers already named, until you activate it.

One practical note on order: you start your signal before you can write your first message. That is step 3, and it takes one tap.

2

Choose who receives it

Each message has its own receivers, identified by an exact WillSignal username or an email address.

The person you choose does not need a WillSignal account when you first address the message to them. If you add them by email, you can choose to send an invitation. The invitation never includes your words. Once they register and verify that address, the message attaches to their account.

Messages are always read inside WillSignal. Their content never travels through email, text message, or any other outside channel. No email from WillSignal ever carries your words.

3

Keep your signal lit

Your signal begins turned off. Nothing counts down, and nothing can be delivered, until you start it yourself.

Once it is running, you choose how long it lasts. Each check-in restarts the full countdown and keeps the signal lit. You can check in from your phone or your desk, as often or as rarely as the duration you chose requires.

Life changes, and the signal can change with it. Pause it whenever you need to. A paused signal does not drain and cannot go out. Resume it when you are ready.

Your signal also does not fade silently. If your account has a verified email address, WillSignal sends reminders to it as the signal dims, spaced according to the duration you chose. Each reminder says how much time is left and asks you to check in. It never names a message or a receiver.

4

If your signal goes out, delivery starts

When your signal goes out, delivery begins. Every message you have ready is delivered inside the app to the receivers who have already joined WillSignal, up to the delivery slots on your account. Slots are shared across all your messages, and anyone beyond them stays staged rather than delivered — waiting for a slot to free up and for your signal to go out again. The FAQ explains how the slots work.

Anyone you addressed who has not joined yet loses nothing. The message remains safely with your account. Delivery itself, however, only ever lands inside a WillSignal account, which is why sending the invitation early can matter.

A short, content-free email lets receivers know that a message is waiting, if they have an address on file and have not turned those notices off. The words themselves remain inside the app.

Your own dashboard also shows clearly that your signal went out, and WillSignal emails you as well if you have a verified address on file.

Whether a receiver knows who the message came from is your choice. By default, you remain anonymous. A receiver sees your name only if you chose to sign the message for them.

Until then, everything stays sealed

Before your signal goes out, the people you chose can see only that something is waiting for them: a count, and nothing else.

They cannot see the words, your name, or when the message might arrive. Until your signal goes out, the words remain yours.

If it goes out by mistake

A signal that goes out by mistake is recoverable.

You can pull back any delivered message. Pulling it back removes it from the receiver’s inbox, although it cannot undo anything they have already seen.

Restart your signal when you are ready. Restarting after a mistake carries a lock that grows with repetition. That is deliberate: it keeps a signal that went out meaning what it says.

Built to deliver late, never early

Every WillSignal fail-safe leans in the same direction: toward delay.

If the service is interrupted, running countdowns are credited forward. The time the service was unavailable is added back, and a countdown close to zero is given a fresh window on top, so that an outage does not spend time you had no way to check in through.

We also watch whether check-ins are reaching WillSignal at all. When that monitoring goes dark, our posture is to hold delivery rather than let it proceed. It is a control we operate, not a property of the code.

Closing your account also freezes your signal for the full 30-day grace window. An account that is closing never delivers anything.

A failure on our side can postpone delivery. Nothing here is built to start one.

Locked and Standard messages

Every message uses one of two modes, and the promises they make are materially different.

In Locked mode, neither your passphrase nor the key that opens your words ever reaches WillSignal, and that protection comes with a cost. If an account loses both its passphrase and recovery code, its old key is permanently lost. Locked words sealed only to that key may become unreadable.

When this happens on a receiver’s side, you can reseal the message to their new key. Resealing is always your explicit choice and never happens automatically, which also means it needs a sender who can still sign in and act. Messages from someone whose signal has already gone out are unlikely ever to be resealed.

The exact guarantees of both modes, along with their limits, are explained on the Security page.

What WillSignal is not