Looking is free. Adding is what you pay for.
Invite as many people as you like to see an archive and comment on it, on every plan, at no cost. A paid seat is only needed by someone who wants to upload, record or scan. That way a grandmother with forty relatives is not a bill, and the person who finally names the boy in the 1958 photograph never hits a paywall to do it.
- •See everything you have been invited to see
- •Comment and name people, which is where most of the value comes from
- •Invite as many viewers as you like
- •Cannot upload or record
- •Start an archive and be the one adding to it
- •Map anchoring and street level views
- •Recorded stories, transcribed, audio kept
- •Sealed and after-death releases
- •30GB
- •Everything in Solo, for five people who can add
- •Two parents, two children and a grandparent, or three siblings and two spouses
- •Resurfacing, with pause controls
- •100GB
- •Cheaper than three Solo seats
- •A sixth, seventh or eighth person who can upload
- •Adds 10GB each
- •Cancel any one of them at any time
- •For an archive that is finished rather than abandoned
- •Everything stays browsable, searchable and shareable
- •New family can still be invited in and tagged
- •Up to 50GB
- •Move to it or back out whenever you like
Some of this should not live on a screen.
A digital frame that arrives already paired. A printed album. A box of loose photographs we scan for you. The questions to ask your mother, so the recording actually happens. A remembrance book, if and when it is wanted.
Available on every plan, including Free and Vault, because the moment a family most wants a printed book is rarely the moment they are paying us the most.
If you stop paying, nothing is deleted. Ever.
Most storage services move a lapsed account to a free tier and delete whatever will not fit. We are asking families to put irreplaceable things here, so that is not a policy we are willing to have.
Keeping your archive safe and serving it to you instantly are two different costs, and only one of them is expensive. So we charge for the second and never for the first.
- Ninety days, and nothing happens at all. If a payment fails, the archive carries on exactly as it was for three months. Cards expire, people die, families have a lot on. None of that is a reason to touch anything.
- After that it moves to long-term storage. Complete, intact and still yours. The only thing that changes is that it is no longer instantly browsable, and it is restored within a day the moment anyone comes back.
- Export is free, always, including from long-term storage. Every original file, plus a readable offline copy that opens without us.
- Anyone in the family can take over the payment. Billing belongs to the archive, not to one person, so a forgotten card or a death does not put it at risk.
- If Storees ever fails, a published wind-down policy triggers a full export for every archive before anything else happens.
We will never charge a family to stop us deleting something. If that is ever the business, it is the wrong business.
Why subscription, and what we are watching.
A one-off payment for permanent storage is arguably more honest, and at least one organisation does exactly that by putting fees into an endowment. We have chosen a subscription because an archive that is still being added to keeps growing and keeps costing, and because a family still adding to it in year ten is a family the product is working for.
The risk in that choice is obvious and we would rather name it than hide it: a subscription is a promise you have to keep paying for. The five commitments above are how we intend to keep it worth keeping, and the reason we can afford them is the distinction at the top of that list. Preserving a dormant archive costs us a few pence a year. Serving it instantly does not. Charging for the cheap half would be an easy few pounds and a very poor trade.
Prototype only. Prices illustrative and not yet tested with anyone.