What Happens to Your Digital Accounts, Subscriptions and Passwords When You Die?

Part of the Getting Your Affairs in Order series by Done Once Lab

Most people have a reasonable picture of what happens to their house, their bank accounts, and their personal belongings when they die.

Almost nobody has thought carefully about what happens to the other half of their life — the half that lives online.

The scale of the problem

The average person has over 100 online accounts. Email addresses, social media profiles, streaming services, cloud storage, banking portals, subscription software, loyalty programmes, investment platforms, crypto wallets.

When someone dies, those accounts don't close automatically. They don't transfer automatically. Many of them keep running — and keep charging.

The people left handling the estate are often locked out entirely, with no passwords and no clear legal authority to access accounts that platforms treat as private property.

What happens to different types of accounts

Social media: Facebook allows accounts to be memorialised or deleted — but only if someone notifies them and can prove the death. Instagram, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter) have similar processes, each requiring documentation. Without notification, accounts sit dormant — or worse, become targets for hackers who know the owner has died.

Email: Your email account is likely the hub of your entire digital life — password resets, bank alerts, insurance documents, receipts. Losing access to it means losing access to almost everything else. Google allows an Inactive Account Manager to be designated; Microsoft has a Next of Kin process. Both require planning ahead.

Subscriptions: Netflix, Spotify, cloud storage, software subscriptions — these keep charging until someone cancels them. A family dealing with grief can easily miss months of charges on accounts they can't even access. Subscription services don't stop at death unless someone actively cancels them.

Financial accounts: Online banking, investment platforms, and brokerage portals contain actual money. These accounts pass according to beneficiary designations and estate law — but physically accessing them requires either passwords, legal authority, or both.

Cloud storage: Years of photos, important documents, and personal files may live only in cloud storage. Without the right access, these can be permanently lost.

The password problem

Here's the practical reality: most families, when dealing with a death, don't have the passwords.

They may be able to request access through platforms — but each one has its own process, often requiring death certificates, legal documents, and weeks of waiting. Some platforms won't grant access at all.

The cleanest solution, set up while the person is still alive, is a password manager with an emergency access feature. A trusted person is designated who can request access if something happens. The person knows they've been designated. They know which password manager to use. They have the master password or know how to request access.

The Legacy Asset Locator is designed to work alongside this setup — recording where accounts are and who the emergency contact is, without storing passwords itself.

What to do now

Three things make an enormous difference:

Set up a password manager with emergency access. One central place for your logins, with a trusted person designated to access it if needed.

Configure legacy settings on major platforms. Google, Apple, and Facebook all have settings that let you designate what happens to your account. Most people have never looked at them.

Create a record of what accounts exist. Your family doesn't need your passwords to start — they need to know which accounts are out there. A Legacy Asset Locator's digital presence category is built exactly for this.

Start your free Legacy Asset Locator at doneoncelab.com/legacy-asset-locator

Common questions

Can my family legally access my accounts after I die?

It depends on the platform and your jurisdiction. Laws vary significantly. In the US, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA) gives executors some rights over digital assets, but these can be overridden by a platform's terms of service. Pre-planning through legacy settings and a password manager is far more reliable than relying on legal access after the fact.

What happens to subscriptions when someone dies?

They keep charging until someone cancels them. This requires either login access or contacting the provider with proof of death. Without a record of what subscriptions exist, families routinely miss months of charges on accounts they can't identify.

Should I put my passwords in my will?

No. Wills become public record through probate. Putting passwords in a will exposes them to anyone who can access the probate record. Store them in a secure password manager and designate emergency access separately.

What's the most important digital account to plan for?

Your primary email account. It's the key to almost everything else — password resets, bank alerts, insurance documents, and account recovery all flow through it. If your family has access to your email, they can reach most of your other accounts. If they don't, almost everything else becomes significantly harder.

This article is part of the Getting Your Affairs in Order series from Done Once Lab. Educational in nature — not legal or financial advice. Platform policies change; check current settings on each platform.