Privacy policy

1. Who we are and how to contact us

HeirWell is operated by HeirWell Ltd, a company registered in Northern Ireland (company number NI732507), registered office: 93 Magheraboy Avenue, Portrush, Northern Ireland, BT56 8GW. HeirWell Ltd is the controller of the personal data described in this policy and is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (registration ZC133604). This policy covers the HeirWell application and our website, heirwell.co.uk.

For anything relating to your personal data — questions, requests, or complaints — contact us at contact@heirwell.co.uk.

2. The information we collect

• Your account: your name, date of birth, email address, phone number, address, and sign-in credentials (passkeys or one-time codes — we never store passwords).
• Estate records you enter: details of the deceased person and their estate — assets, debts, valuations, gifts, tax details (including National Insurance and tax reference numbers), and the names and details of beneficiaries and other people involved in the estate.
• Documents you upload: wills, death certificates, identity documents, statements and correspondence, stored in a private encrypted vault.
• Correspondence: emails you send and receive through your HeirWell email addresses, including attachments.
• Payments: handled by Stripe. We record that you paid and the amount; your card details go directly to Stripe and are never stored by us.
• Technical and security data: IP address, browser characteristics, and security event logs (such as sign-ins), kept to protect your account.

3. People other than the account holder

Estate administration necessarily involves information about other people. Data protection law does not apply to the deceased, but we protect their information with the same security as everything else. Information about livingpeople — beneficiaries, co-executors, co-owners, trustees, family members, and people who write to an estate's HeirWell email address — is personal data, and this policy applies to it. We receive it from the executor who enters it, or from the sender of an email. We hold it on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing the executor with the estate-administration service, and we do not use it for any other purpose. Because it is not practical for us to contact each person directly, we rely on the executor to tell the people involved, where appropriate, that their details are recorded in HeirWell, and we make this policy publicly available. If your information has been entered into HeirWell by an executor, or you have corresponded with an executor through a HeirWell email address, and you have questions or wish to exercise your rights, contact us at the address above.

4. Sensitive information

We never ask for special category data, but documents and correspondence you choose to store may incidentally contain it (for example a cause of death on a certificate, or care-related letters). We process it only because you choose to store those records for the estate, and it is never used for any other purpose.

5. How we use your information, and our lawful bases

• Providing HeirWell — your task lists, asset records, documents, mail and generated forms (lawful basis: performing our contract with you).
• Payments and accounting (contract, and our legal obligations).
• Security — authentication, fraud prevention, rate limiting and audit logs (our legitimate interest in keeping accounts and data safe).
• Service communications — emails about your account or the service (contract). We do not send marketing.
• Organising your correspondence — see section 6 (our legitimate interest in making the service work for you).
• Information about other people involved in the estate — see section 3 (our legitimate interest in providing the service to the executor).
• Understanding how the website and app are used — cookieless page-view and page-speed statistics collected by Vercel: the page visited, the page it was reached from, country, browser and device type, and a daily-changing identifier that is not linked to your account. They set nothing on your device, do not follow you across other sites and never include your estate records (our legitimate interest in running and improving the service). You can object at any time by emailing contact@heirwell.co.uk.

6. Automated email organisation

When an email arrives at your HeirWell address, an AI model we trained ourselves from an open-source base — hosted on infrastructure provided by our processor Modal, never a third-party AI service — reads it to suggest what it is about (for example an acknowledgement or a document request) and to surface follow-up tasks. Your correspondence is not shared with any third-party AI service. This only organises your inbox — no decision with legal or similarly significant effect is ever made about you solely by automated means, and you can always act on or ignore the suggestions.

7. Who we share information with

We never sell personal data, and we share it only with the service providers (processors) that run HeirWell, under contracts that bind them to protect it:

• Supabase — database, authentication and document storage (hosted in London, UK).
• Vercel — hosting for the application and website, and the cookieless usage and page-speed statistics described in section 5.
• Upstash — a short-lived counter store (provisioned through Vercel) that limits how often sign-in and other sensitive actions can be attempted; it holds only the email address, IP address or account reference being rate-limited, for the minutes each limit applies.
• Postmark (ActiveCampaign) — sending and receiving email.
• Stripe — payment processing.
• Modal — cloud infrastructure that hosts the AI model described in section 6.
• Cloudflare — the security check (CAPTCHA) on sign-in.
• Microsoft 365 — the mailbox behind contact@heirwell.co.uk, which receives your support, deletion and refund requests.
• Sentry — error monitoring, so we can find and fix faults; crash reports contain technical data (such as browser and device details; IP addresses are not stored in them), never your estate records.

Beyond these processors, we disclose personal data only if the law requires it or to protect our legal rights.

8. International transfers

Your estate records and documents are stored in the UK. Some of our processors (such as Stripe, Postmark, Vercel, Modal and Cloudflare) process data in the United States or other countries. Where that happens, the transfer is protected by UK-approved safeguards — the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, or an adequacy decision where one applies.

9. How long we keep information

We keep your account and estate data for as long as your account is open, so the estate record remains available to you throughout administration. You can delete individual assets, documents and messages at any time. When you request account deletion (section 10), we erase your account and estate data within one month of verifying the request, after which residual copies clear from our encrypted backups over a short further period. Payment records are kept as long as accounting law requires. Security and sign-in logs — the time, IP address and browser of events such as sign-ins and passkey changes, and the record of a deletion request — may be kept after your account is closed, limited to what we need to protect the service and to show that your request was honoured. When an estate is deleted we permanently keep a record of its retired HeirWell email address, solely so that the address is never issued to anyone else; no other estate information is kept with it.

Our processors hold copies only as their function requires and under the safeguards in section 8 — for example our email provider keeps copies of messages sent and received through HeirWell, including their content and attachments, for 45 days before deleting them (your own copy stays in your HeirWell account); Stripe keeps payment records for as long as financial regulation requires, and hosting providers keep short-lived technical logs. If you send us product feedback, we may keep it after an estate or account is deleted, detached from the estate it concerned — you can ask us to erase it at any time.

10. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to access your personal data, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict or object to our processing of it, to data portability, and to withdraw consent where processing is based on consent. Exercising them is free, and we respond within one month.

To delete your account, submit a request from Profile settings → Close account inside the app, or email contact@heirwell.co.uk from your account email address. Either way, deletion is completed by our team rather than instantly — we verify the request, erase your account and estate data as section 9 describes, and confirm to you once it is done. You can delete individual estates yourself at any time from within the app.

If you want to complain about how we handle your personal data, email contact@heirwell.co.uk (put “data protection complaint” in the subject line) or write to us at our registered office in section 1. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days of receiving it, look into it without undue delay, and tell you the outcome. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk at any time, though we would welcome the chance to resolve your concern first.

11. Cookies

HeirWell stores only what it needs to work, in cookies and your browser's local storage: the tokens that keep you signed in, your choice of whether to stay signed in between visits, which estate you last had open (so the app reopens on it), a reminder-snooze for passkey setup, the email address you last signed in with (to pre-fill the sign-in form; cleared when you sign out), and the cookie our sign-in security check (Cloudflare Turnstile) needs to work. We set no advertising cookies and no analytics cookies — the usage statistics described in section 5 work without cookies — which is why we show no cookie banner.

12. Children

HeirWell is for executors and administrators of estates, who must be adults — the service is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from children themselves. An executor may record a child (for example a minor beneficiary of a will) as part of an estate; that information is held as estate data about other people, as described in section 3.

13. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy — for example when adding a feature or a processor — we will update it here and refresh the date at the top. Significant changes will be flagged in the app.