Terms of Service

Effective August 9, 2026

Effective August 9, 2026. These are the terms of the agreement between you and Still Arrives (referred to below as "we," "us," or "the service"). Reading them takes ten minutes. We tried to write them the way we would want a service holding a ten-year letter of ours to write them.

1. What we do

We accept a letter from you today, along with any photos and context you choose to include, and we deliver it to an email address you specify on a date you specify. That's the whole product.

By using the service, you agree to these terms.

2. What you agree to

You agree that:

  • You will only seal content you have the right to seal. Photos of others, quotes from books, borrowed writing — you're responsible for having the rights.
  • You will not use us for anything illegal or to harm anyone else. No harassment, no threats, no content that violates the laws of the jurisdictions you or the recipient are in.
  • The email addresses you give us are yours to give. If you send a letter to someone else, you confirm you have permission to contact them at that address.
  • You are at least 16 years old. We are not designed for younger users.

We reserve the right to remove content and terminate accounts that violate these terms. If we do, we will still deliver any already-sealed letters to the addresses you provided.

3. Our delivery promise

These four commitments are what makes the service worth using. Every one of them is what it says on the tin — no softening qualifiers, no fine print elsewhere that undoes them.

3.1 We will not give up after five tries

On your scheduled delivery date, we attempt the primary email address you provided. If that fails — bounce, rejection, or filter — we automatically try the backup address if you gave us one. If both channels fail, we do not delete the letter. We continue retrying for at least three years, at a decreasing frequency, and we hold the letter in a claim queue attached to your original account so that you can retrieve it manually at any time.

Most services in this category retry a handful of times and delete undelivered letters. We do not do that.

3.2 If the service ends, your letter still arrives — early

Every deployment of this service includes a dead man's switch: a scheduled task that fires if the operator of the service is unable to respond for 6 months, or triggers a manual shutdown. When the switch fires, every unopened capsule is delivered immediately, ahead of its scheduled date, with a short note explaining why. Your letter does not disappear with us.

This mechanism is real and it runs every day. It is what allows us to offer letters delivered a decade from now with a straight face.

3.3 You can take your data out at any time

You may export the full contents of your account — letters, photos, context, delivery history, audit records — in a single JSON download, at any time, without contacting support. The format is open and does not require our service to read. If we ever cease to be your preferred custodian, you are not locked in.

3.4 We set aside 10% of long-term revenue for delivery

For any capsule scheduled to arrive more than one year from purchase, 10% of the revenue is allocated to a delivery reserve. This reserve exists to pay the technical and operational costs of keeping already-sealed capsules deliverable, and it is not used for marketing or new development. The size of this reserve is a fixed rule; it is not a marketing claim we can adjust later.

4. Wind-down notice

If we decide to shut the service down under ordinary circumstances (rather than the sudden dead-man's-switch scenario), we will send at least 90 days' notice to every account with active capsules or letters awaiting delivery. During that notice period the export feature and the delivery pipeline continue to work normally.

5. What we do not promise

Being honest about limits is part of being trustworthy:

  • We cannot guarantee perpetual operation. Life happens. What we can guarantee is that if we can't continue, section 3.2 fires and your letters arrive before we go.
  • We do not offer real-time or enterprise SLAs. This is not that kind of service.
  • We do not encrypt letters in a way that prevents us from reading them. Our storage uses AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS in transit, and access is logged and permitted only for defined security, support, and legal purposes. But the encryption keys are held by us, not by you. If we ever adopt zero-knowledge encryption we will say so plainly. Until then, we do not claim otherwise.
  • We cannot recover a letter after you delete it. After the cooldown period ends, deletion is permanent by design. See section 8.

6. Fees, refunds, and non-payment

The first capsule you create is free. Additional capsules and long-horizon capsules are priced separately; current pricing appears on our pricing page.

Payment is processed through a third-party payment provider that acts as merchant of record. Refunds are handled under our refund policy, which is available at /legal/refunds.

If you have unpaid balances or your subscription lapses, we will still deliver capsules you have already paid for. You will lose the ability to create new capsules until the balance is resolved.

7. Content, moderation, and cooperation with authorities

We do not routinely inspect the contents of sealed capsules. Administrative tools intentionally do not surface the private contents of user letters.

We will cooperate with valid legal requests from competent authorities to access specific accounts. When we do, we log the request, the response, and the account affected. Applicable law permitting, we will notify the affected user.

We reserve the right to remove content — including sealed capsules — that we discover violates section 2, or that we are compelled by law to remove. Deletion by us is treated the same as deletion by you: seven-day cooldown, then permanent removal.

8. Deletion and cooldown

You can delete any capsule at any time.

  • Drafts are removed immediately.
  • Sealed, delivered, and opened capsules enter a 7-day cooldown. During this window you can restore them from your account with no data loss.
  • After the cooldown expires, deletion is permanent. We do not retain backups beyond that point (subject to accounting and legal-hold requirements which we describe in the privacy policy).

9. Account termination by us

We may terminate your account without notice for violations of section 2 or for repeated failure to pay owed balances.

We will provide 30 days' notice for terminations that are our decision but not caused by a violation on your side (for example, discontinuing a payment method we can no longer support). During those 30 days you can export your data and, if the timing works, we will attempt delivery of any capsules whose scheduled date falls within the window.

10. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. When we make a change that materially affects your rights — including any change to sections 3, 4, or 8 — we will notify all account holders by email at least 30 days before the change takes effect. You can review the effective date at the top of this page.

Previously effective versions of these terms remain available on request.

11. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the operator's jurisdiction, subject to the mandatory consumer protection laws of your country of residence. If we ever have a dispute, we agree to try direct discussion first — please write to legal@stillarrives.com before filing any formal action.

12. Contact

We aim to answer within 5 business days.