Digital Legacy Platforms: GoodTrust vs Everplans and Cake

Search for help with a digital estate and the results are dominated by platforms that look alike and sell at similar prices. They are not alike. Some draft documents a court will act on; others organise information a court cannot use on its own. Buyers routinely pay for the wrong category and discover the gap at the worst possible moment, when a grieving family opens the account and finds either an unlocatable will or a flawless filing cabinet with nothing inside it. This is the same distinction set out in digital will vs letter of instructions.

Conclusion: generators create the skeleton, vaults are the map

The category you need is decided by what you are missing, not by which platform has the better interface. If no will exists, a vault is premature: you would be filing information around a legal vacuum. If the will exists and nobody can find the accounts, a generator adds nothing. The clean mental model from the 2026 market comparisons is that generators produce the legal skeleton and vaults produce the map, and a complete estate needs both. The practical question is only which one you are missing today.

Document generators: Trust & Will and the rest

A generator interviews you and outputs an executable instrument. Trust & Will charges around $199 one-time for a will plan with a $19 annual renewal, or around $499 plus $39 for a trust plan, with attorney review available as an add-on. LegalZoom sits in the same category, with a published entry price that has ranged between $89 and $149 depending on promotion and state. GoodTrust also belongs here, but it stops being a pure generator because it bundles a vault alongside the documents. The key property of this category is durability: once the document is printed, witnessed and signed, it is valid whether or not you keep paying, which is the strongest argument for buying a generator before anything else.

Digital vaults: Everplans, Trustworthy and Cake

A vault assumes the paperwork exists and solves the discovery problem instead: which accounts exist, where the documents live, who is entitled to see what, and when. Everplans charges around $99.99 a year and organises information into categories, releasing sections to people you nominate as deputies. Trustworthy leans on collaboration and mobile access with a free entry tier and paid plans from roughly $10 to $40 a month billed annually. Cake is free and narrower: it documents medical wishes, funeral preferences, financial information and personal messages through guided questions, produces shareable output, and offers no secure storage and no legal drafting. None of these three drafts a will.

Side by side: what each one actually gives you

• GoodTrust — Hybrid. Estate+ bundles will, revocable living trust, financial power of attorney and healthcare directive with a digital vault and family plans, around $149 up front plus a $39 annual renewal. No attorney review. Web-only. Strongest single purchase if you have no documents yet
• Everplans — Vault. Roughly $99.99 a year, sharing to named deputies, very thorough content across legal, insurance, accounts, final wishes and personal messages. No drafting, no fiduciary escalation for granular access disputes
• Trust & Will — Generator. State-specific wills, trusts, powers of attorney and directives, around $199 for a will plan and $499 for a trust plan, $299 to add attorney review. Trust documents unavailable in Louisiana. US residents only
• LegalZoom — Generator. Long-established, widely used for basic wills and trusts, entry pricing between $89 and $149 depending on state and promotion, with attorney review available as a separate purchase
• Cake — Free planning companion. Guided capture of wishes, preferences, financial notes and personal messages, no secure storage, no legal documents. Best used to build the first inventory before committing money

Where every one of them falls short

Two gaps are common to the whole category. The first is credentials. A vault that stores passwords is only as strong as its release rule, and a document generator must never be given passwords because wills become public records during probate. The second is assets that never appear in a standard will: a self-custody wallet, a registered domain, an account holding only licensed content. No consumer platform creates the access route to those. The limits of what a legacy contact can reach explain the platform side of the same problem, and the crypto cases are covered in crypto exchange estate claims.

How to choose in three questions

• Do I have a signed will and powers of attorney? — If not, start with a generator. Documents are the foundation and nothing else compensates for their absence
• Does anyone else know what I hold and where it is? — If not, the gap is discovery, and a vault fixes it. Nominate the people who will need it while you are still able to explain the structure to them
• Do I hold anything no will can reach? — Crypto, domains, business accounts, licensed media. If yes, neither category is sufficient alone and the credentials need a separate route with a named trigger condition. This is the problem TimeWill is built around: it stores the inventory, the access instructions and any letters encrypted, and releases them to a trusted contact through heartbeat check-in

Disclaimer

This article is general information, not legal or financial advice. Pricing, feature bundles and jurisdictional coverage change frequently and the figures cited reflect published information at the time of writing. Platform terms differ by country and by state, and none of these services replaces advice from a qualified attorney in your jurisdiction.