StoryVaultFamily archive
Start your archive

Before it’s too late — gently put

Your grandmother knows two hundred stories.

Nobody has written down one.

A private family archive. Start it, text your relatives a link, and one question a week fills it in — in writing or in their own voice. No app to install, nothing public, nothing sold.

Start your family archiveSee a sample archive

Free to start · Works on any phone · Invite as many relatives as you like

This week’s question

What did your street sound like at night?

24questions, one every Sunday

Three steps, then it runs itself

One

Start the vault

Name your family and answer the first question yourself. Two minutes, and there is something in it.

Two

Text everyone the link

No accounts to chase. They tap, they type or talk, it lands in the archive.

Three

One question a week

Sunday morning, everybody gets the same question. A year later you have a book.

Chapter two · Sunday kitchens

Bay leaf and burnt sugar. My mother kept a pot going on Sundays — you could smell it from the corner before you turned onto the street. She never wrote a recipe down in her life, and she could tell from the doorway if you had touched the lid.

Mary Henson, recorded March 2026

The keepsake book

At 40 stories, it becomes a book.

Every answer is typeset the way it was told — voice notes transcribed, names and dates intact. Read it in the browser, or order the hardcover for the grandchildren who cannot read yet.

Start your archive

Voice memories

A transcript is a record. A voice is a person.

Typing is work at eighty-two. Talking isn’t. Your grandfather taps one button and tells it the way he tells it at the table — the pause before the punchline, the way he says your mother’s name. It lands in the archive beside everyone else’s, dated and kept. Years from now that recording is the thing your kids will play back.

Tap to record — just talk

A note from the founder

I took apart my first Nintendo at nine just to see how it worked, and I never stopped taking things apart.

I lost my mom at thirteen. Last year I lost my grandmother, and I realized I had never recorded her telling one single story. I know her voice from memory, and memory fades. That’s the part you don’t get back.

My wife and I built StoryVault so our six-year-old grows up with what I don’t have. Do it before you need it — that’s the only advice I’ve got.

GuapFounder, Brown Pig LLC · husband, dad, tinkerer

What it costs

Free

Collecting, forever

Every story, every recording, every relative, every week. No card to start, no trial that ends, no limit on how many people you invite.

$9.99

The book, once

One payment unlocks the typeset book at 40 stories — download it again in ten years. Not a subscription.

$39.00

A hardcover, if you want one

Printed to order and posted to you — or straight to whoever you’re giving it to. Shipping shown at checkout.

Nothing you have already written ever gets locked behind a payment.

Questions families ask

Do my grandparents need an app?

No. You text a link, they tap it, they're in. No app store, no password to invent.

Who can see our stories?

Only whoever has your link and code. Never indexed, never public, never sold. Codes can be rotated any time.

What if grandma isn't good with tech?

One link, one question, one big button — and she can talk instead of type.

Can we record over the phone?

Her phone is the recorder — right in the browser. The weekly question can arrive by text so she never hunts for it.

What if I stop paying or stop using it?

There's no subscription. Collecting is free; the keepsake book is a one-time unlock. Nothing saved gets locked away.