DeathNote now supports multiple notes! This is a feature we’ve been planning for a long time, almost since the very beginning, but didn’t want to build until the model was perfectly proven.

And, we didn’t want to invest too much time into these advanced features until we knew that the core experience was working and that we had the interest to boot.

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Well, things have been working really well with happy customers. And the interest in our platform and technology has been growing, very steadily.

It’s all be super-positive — here’s a look at our organic growth on the web:

In the last 6 months we’ve just gone up and up and up with more registrations and new community members every single day. The growth has been slow and steady, just like we wanted it to be. Nothing crazy. Just repeatedly showing up, every single day and providing meaningful value.

So, it was about time to move on from a one note per account type system, which kept the product simple, but was too limiting for our users and not quite realistic for what people want to do and delivery when they pass.

You see, real relationships are not all the same. A note for a spouse is not the same note you would write for a parent. A message for a sibling is not the same as something practical for a co-founder, a business partner, or the person who needs the passwords and documents.

Your accountant and your lawyer should get different notes, right?

Consequently, one shared note forced people into compromise. Either the message got watered down until it sort of fit for everyone on your list or important things got left out entirely.

So we changed it.

Why This Matters

DeathNote is supposed to help people be precise. Not louder. Not more complicated. Just more precise.

If the writing context is different, the note should be different. If the recipient list is different, the delivery logic should be different too. That sounds obvious, but the product did not fully reflect that before.

Multiple notes fixes that. One account can now hold more than one note, each note can have its own recipient mapping, and the editor can tell you exactly what you are working on instead of pretending one message covers every relationship equally well.

What Changed

Here is what shipped:

• You can create and manage multiple notes from the editor instead of being locked to one account-wide message.

• Each note can be renamed, switched, archived, restored, and deleted without breaking the active-note flow.

• Recipient assignment is now explicit per note, not implied by one shared selection state.

• The editor shows the delivery context for the active note, including who it applies to and whether delivery is actually active.

• Preview email now follows the active note you selected, instead of risking the wrong note content.

• The dashboard reflects note assignments directly, so it is clearer who is attached to what.

We also tightened the gating so the product behaves predictably across plans:

• Free accounts keep one active note and one active recipient.

• Paid plans unlock multiple active notes.

• Premium unlocks more than one active recipient at a time.

And importantly, downgrade behavior is non-destructive. Extra notes and assignments are stored, not deleted. If you downgrade, they become inactive. If you upgrade again, they reactivate.

The Hard Part

This was not a surface-level feature.

Multiple notes touched note loading, active-note pointers, recipient assignment state, previews, delivery seeding, retries, webhook reconciliation, downgrade rules, and migration safety.

That matters because the failure mode here is not a button looking weird. The failure mode is silent behavior drift:

• The wrong note getting previewed

• The wrong note getting retried

• Recipient state becoming ambiguous

• Downgrade flows deleting or mutating data people expected to keep

That is why this took a staged rollout instead of one big switch.

What We Hardened Under The Hood

The product change is visible. The more important work is what changed underneath it. Here’s a look at what we built:

• Delivery jobs now carry note snapshots. If a delivery job is seeded and the note changes later, retries stay tied to the original job snapshot instead of drifting to whatever the current note happens to be.

• Recipient assignment is many-to-many now. We stopped pretending a contact could be represented by one flat delivery flag. The system now tracks note-to-recipient assignment directly, which is the only model that makes sense once multiple notes exist.

• Webhook failures map back to the exact delivery path. If an email provider reports a failure, the system can reconcile that failure to the correct job and assignment instead of mutating generic contact state.

• Downgrades preserve data. Stored notes and stored assignments do not disappear just because a plan changes. They become inactive until the plan supports them again.

• Editor and dashboard loading got cleaned up too. Some of the old singleton assumptions caused redundant reads and fragile UI states. Those paths are now more consistent because the app has a real note model instead of a hidden one-note assumption everywhere.

What This Means For People Using DeathNote

The simple version:

You can now write more honestly.

In other words:

• You do not have to force one note to serve every person in your life.

• You can separate emotional context from operational context.

• You can write something intimate for one person and something much more practical for another.

• You can be specific without making the note generalized or confusing.

We also think the system is easier to trust now, because it is more explicit about what will be delivered, to whom, and from which note.

You see, this is entirely deliberate. Intentional. A digital legacy product should not treat delivery behavior like a casual feature release. Every note is made-to-order.

Just as it should have been.

— 8

TL;DR:

DeathNote now supports multiple notes. One shared message was too limiting for real relationships, so we changed the product to allow note-specific writing context, explicit note-to-recipient assignment, and clearer delivery behavior.

The visible feature is simple, but we also hardened previews, retries, webhooks, downgrade handling, and delivery jobs underneath it so the system stays precise when it matters.

Oh! And thanks to my business partner who suggested this even before we wrote a single line of code! They saw the future and it just took time for us to build it.

Thank you.

For the past few months I have been writing about eulogies. How to write them. How AI generates them. How tone shapes them. How to give one for someone you barely knew.

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This post is about the bigger picture. Because eulogies are one fragment of a much larger question: what happens to our words, our accounts, our digital selves, and our final wishes when we die?

The Eulogy Problem Was a Symptom

I built a free eulogy generator because I saw people struggling with a terrible writing assignment at the worst possible time. That tool works. People use it. It led to our first paying customer.

But the problem the eulogy revealed is bigger than eulogies.

The person writing that eulogy at 2:00am is also the person who:

• Does not know the passwords to their parent’s accounts.

• Cannot access the deceased’s email to cancel subscriptions.

• Has no idea if there was a digital will.

• Does not know which photos are backed up where.

• Was never told what the person actually wanted said at the funeral.

The eulogy is the urgent thing. But the infrastructure of death preparation is the important thing. And almost nobody has it ready.

The State of Digital Death

Here is what happens when someone dies in 2026:

1. Their accounts persist. Email keeps receiving. Subscriptions keep charging. Social media stays up. Cloud storage keeps billing. No one has the passwords. Some platforms have legacy contact features, most do not, and the ones that do are buried in settings menus nobody configures.

2. Their wishes are unknown. Did they want to be cremated? Who gets the family photos? Is there a message they wanted delivered? Most people never write this down. The ones who do usually put it in a document nobody can find.

3. Their digital footprint becomes a burden. The surviving family member becomes an unpaid digital executor, spending weeks or months calling customer service lines, submitting death certificates, trying to close accounts for a person who is not there to verify their identity.

4. AI is already being used, whether we planned for it or not. People are using ChatGPT to write eulogies, draft obituaries, compose messages to grieving friends, and even simulate conversations with deceased loved ones. This is happening now, unguided, with no quality standards and no ethical framework.

Serious dynamics that deserve serious consideration, right?

What DeathNote Actually Is

The eulogy generator is one tool. The platform that we’ve built is the infrastructure.

1. Death notes. Write messages to specific people — your children, your partner, your best friend, your lawyer — and encrypt them. They are stored securely and only delivered when you die. Not before.

2. Proof-of-life verification. The system checks in with you on a schedule you set. If you stop responding, it escalates through multiple confirmation channels. If it confirms you are gone, it initiates delivery.

3. Encrypted delivery. Your messages are delivered to the people you specified, through the channels you chose. Email delivery with tracking. Read receipts. The system knows whether your final words reached the people they were meant for.

4. The eulogy generator. The entry point. The tool that brings people in because they need help right now, today, with something urgent and painful. Then they see the rest of the platform and think: I should prepare so my family does not have to go through this.

Simple tools that serve really important needs.

The AI Question

Every few weeks someone asks me: is it weird to use AI to write a eulogy? To write a death note? To compose your final words?

My answer: The AI is not writing your words. It is helping you find them.

When you answer our 8 questions — three words that describe them, one specific memory, something they always said — those are your memories. Your words. Your relationship. The AI structures them. The AI generates a draft. But the raw material is irreplaceably human.

This is the correct use of AI in mortality planning: reduce the friction between your intention and your expression. Make it easier to do the hard thing. Do not replace the human part. Replace the blank page.

The incorrect use — and it exists — is letting AI simulate a dead person. Chatbots that mimic the deceased. AI-generated voice messages from people who never recorded them. That is not legacy planning. That is something else, and I am not building it.

What I Have Learned

Building a death preparation platform teaches you things about people that nothing else does.

People want to prepare. The assumption that “nobody wants to think about death” is wrong. Lots of people want to think about it. They just do not have good tools. When you give them a free eulogy generator, they use it. When you show them they can write death notes to their children, they sign up.

The entry point matters. Nobody wakes up and googles “digital death preparation platform.” They google “free eulogy generator” because someone they love just died. They google “proof of life app” because they are going on a solo backpacking trip. They google “posthumous messages” because they read an article about someone who left one. The entry point is always a specific need. The platform reveals itself from there.

Simple beats comprehensive. Our eulogy generator asks 8 questions. Not 40. Our death notes are plain text with encryption. Not multimedia productions. Our proof-of-life check is a simple verification prompt. Not a biometric scan. The simpler the tool, the more people actually use it.

Death is universal but grief is cultural. This is why we translated the library into 50 languages. It is why the eulogy generator has 4 tones. It is why we do not prescribe how someone should grieve or prepare. We give them tools and let them use them in whatever way makes sense for their family, their culture, their situation.

Where This Goes

The eulogy generator will keep getting better. More tones. Better output. Multilingual generation. Integration with the rest of the platform so you can save a eulogy to someone’s memorial page.

The death note system will keep getting more durable. More delivery channels. Better verification. Stronger encryption.

The library will keep growing. More languages. More guides. More practical information for people navigating the worst bureaucracy of their lives.

And the platform will keep doing the one thing it was built to do: make it so that when you die, the people you love are not left scrambling. They have your words. They have your wishes. They have a eulogy they can actually deliver.

That is the promise.

— 8

Since launching the eulogy generator at DeathNote, hundreds of eulogies have come through the system and we have read more eulogies in the past few months than most funeral directors read in a year.

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That is definitely a strange thought! But, patterns have emerged. The eulogies that work share specific traits. The ones that fall flat share different ones. This post is what we’ve learned (and continue to learn) from our community.

No names, no identifying details. Just the patterns.

The One Rule

Every great eulogy I have seen follows one rule, whether the speaker knew it or not:

Be specific.

Not “she was kind.” How was she kind? Not “he loved his family.” How did he show it? Not “they had a great sense of humor.” What was the joke? What was the moment?

Specificity is the difference between a eulogy that could be about anyone and a eulogy that could only be about one person. The second kind is the one that makes the room cry.

Pattern 1: The Opening Line

The first sentence determines everything.

Openings that work:

• “My brother once convinced an entire restaurant that he was a food critic from the New York Times. He was fourteen.”

• “The last thing my grandmother said to me was ‘stop fussing.’ She said it from a hospital bed. She meant it.”

• “I have been trying to figure out how to describe my dad to people who never met him. The best I have come up with is: imagine the most patient person you know, then double it.”

Openings that do not work:

• “We are gathered here today to celebrate the life of...”

• “Webster’s dictionary defines legacy as...”

• “I want to start by thanking everyone for being here.”

The first category pulls you in. The second category is throat-clearing. The room is already there. They already know why. Skip to the thing that matters.

Pattern 2: The Three-Story Structure

The eulogies that feel complete — not too short, not rambling — almost always contain exactly three stories.

Not two (feels thin). Not four (starts to drag). Three.

Why three works:

• Story 1 establishes who the person was.

• Story 2 deepens the portrait with a different facet.

• Story 3 delivers the emotional core — the one that brings it home.

The best eulogies use their three stories to create a triangulation. Each story shows a different side, and together they form a full picture. The audience does not need to be told “she was compassionate and funny and fierce.” They experience it through the stories.

Pattern 3: The Repeated Phrase

The most memorable eulogies have a phrase that recurs. Not artificially inserted. Naturally woven.

“She would say, ‘well, we will figure it out.’ When the car broke down — we will figure it out. When I failed a class -- we will figure it out. When the diagnosis came — we will figure it out.”

The repetition creates rhythm. It gives the eulogy a heartbeat. And when you use the phrase one last time at the end, the room feels it land.

This is often the answer to our question “something they always said.” That phrase becomes the structural spine of the entire eulogy.

Pattern 4: The Unexpected Detail

The detail that makes a eulogy feel real is usually the one you almost did not include.

“He alphabetized his spice rack. Every single spice. When we moved him to the care facility, he alphabetized theirs too. The nurses let him.”

“She could not parallel park. Forty years of driving and she never once parallel parked successfully. She would circle the block nine times looking for a pull-in spot. We all knew. Nobody said anything.”

These details are not important. That is what makes them important. They are the things that only people who really knew someone would know. They are proof of intimacy. They are what makes the room laugh and cry at the same time.

Pattern 5: The Tense Shift

The eulogies that hit hardest often shift tense at a key moment. Present to past. Or past to present.

“My mom makes — made — the best pie crust in three counties.”

That correction. That stumble between makes and made. It is the most honest moment in any eulogy because it reveals the speaker’s reality in real time: the person is gone and the brain has not caught up yet.

You do not need to plan this. If it happens naturally, let it stay. It is not a mistake. It is truth.

Pattern 6: The Closing Line

How you end matters as much as how you begin.

Closings that work:

• “I will miss you every day, Dad. But I will figure it out. You taught me how.”

• “She is not here. But every time I burn the cookies on purpose because I like them crunchy, she is a little bit here.”

• “Rest, brother. You earned it.”

Closings that do not work:

• “In conclusion, we will all miss John very much.”

• “May he rest in peace.”

• (Trailing off with no clear ending)

The best closing lines circle back to something from earlier in the eulogy. The repeated phrase. The opening story. A detail from the middle. This creates closure — the audience feels the speech was crafted, even if you wrote it at 3am.

The Length Sweet Spot

From the data:

• Under 400 words: Feels rushed. The room has not settled in yet.

• 500-800 words: The sweet spot. 3-5 minutes spoken. Long enough to say something real, short enough to hold attention.

• Over 1,000 words: Starts to test the room’s emotional bandwidth. You can go long if every word earns its place, but most eulogies have padding that should be cut.

The eulogy generator at DeathNote targets 500-800 words by default. It shows live word count and estimated speaking time so you can calibrate.

The Editing Test

Read your eulogy aloud. If any sentence makes you pause and think “I would never actually say that” — cut it or rewrite it in your own words.

AI-generated eulogies have a tell: they use phrases like “left an indelible mark,” “touched the lives of all who knew them,” and “a life well-lived.” These are the machine equivalent of filler words. They sound polished but they say nothing. Replace them with something specific.

“She left an indelible mark” becomes “She taught me how to tie my shoes, how to change a tire, and how to forgive people who do not deserve it.”

Same sentiment. One is wallpaper. The other is a real person.

Build Your Own

If these patterns resonate and you want to build a eulogy using this framework:

1. Write your opening line — one specific detail that captures the person

2. Pick three stories that show different sides of who they were

3. Find the repeated phrase — something they said, something they did, a quality that ran through everything

4. Include one unexpected detail that only someone who loved them would know

5. Close by circling back to where you started

Or use our free AI eulogy generator at to get a structured first draft, then edit using these patterns. 8 questions, 4 tones, full editor. Free.

The best eulogy is the one that sounds like you talking about someone you loved. Everything else is just structure to help you get there.

— 8

This post is for the person who just got asked to speak at a funeral and thought: “Why me? I barely knew them.”

It happens more often than anyone admits.

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A coworker dies and you are the one on the team who is best with words. A distant uncle passes and the family looks at you because you are “the one who gives good toasts.” Your neighbor’s funeral needs another speaker and somehow you are it.

You want to say something meaningful. You do not want to fake intimacy you did not have. And you are panicking because you have three days and six usable memories.

This is the guide for that exact situation.

First: You Are Enough

The fact that you were asked means something. Someone believed you could honor this person. That belief is usually correct — the people who worry most about doing a good job are the ones who do the best job.

You do not need to have been their closest friend. You need to have paid attention.

So, let’s think through how you can do this.

The Coworker Eulogy

This is the most common version of the “barely knew them” speech. You worked with someone for years. You sat in meetings together, ate lunch in the same break room, exchanged pleasantries. Then they died and you realized you knew them well enough to miss them but not well enough to describe them to a stranger.

What you probably do know:

• How they handled stress.

• Their routine (what was on their desk, what they ate for lunch, how they started meetings).

• A moment where they surprised you.

• How they treated people who could not do anything for them.

• What the office feels like without them.

The approach: Frame the eulogy around the limited window you had. Do not pretend you had more.

I did not know Mark outside of work. I did not know his favorite movie or what he did on weekends. What I knew was this: When the server went down at 4:55 on a Friday, Mark stayed.

Every time. And he did not complain about it. He just stayed, fixed it, and then asked if anyone wanted to grab dinner.

That is the Mark I knew. And that Mark was someone worth knowing.

Honest. Specific. Limited in scope. Complete.

The Distant Relative Speech

You are speaking about a great-aunt you saw at Thanksgiving, a cousin twice-removed, a step-grandparent who married into the family after you were grown.

What you probably have:

• A handful of family gathering memories

• A physical description (their laugh, their kitchen, what their house smelled like)

• Stories other family members have told you

• One genuine human moment between the two of you

The approach: Lean into the distance honestly, then close it with the one real moment.

I saw Aunt Rose maybe twice a year growing up. I knew three things about her: The kitchen always smelled like garlic, she called everyone “sweetheart” regardless of whether she knew their name, and she could not operate a remote control to save her life.

My sister spent entire Thanksgivings trying to teach her how to change the input. It never worked. Rose did not care. She was too busy feeding people.

The distance is not a weakness. It is a lens. You saw them from farther away, which sometimes means you saw things the people close to them missed.

The Neighbor / Community Member Speech

You shared a street, a church pew, a PTA committee. You waved from driveways. You knew their dog’s name but not their birthday.

The approach: Community eulogies work best when they focus on presence rather than personality. You did not know their inner world, but you knew what it felt like to have them in yours.

Every morning for seven years, I watched Jim walk his dog past my house at exactly 7:15am.

Rain, snow, August heat. 7:15am, Jim and the dog. I never asked him about it.

But on the mornings when I was running late and I looked out the window and saw Jim, I knew the world was still working. That kind of reliability does not make headlines.

But it builds a neighborhood.

The Research Method

When you do not have enough personal material, become a journalist.

Call 2-3 people who knew them well. Ask them these questions:

1. Three words that describe them…

2. One specific memory…

3. Something they always said…

4. What brought them joy…

5. Their gift to others…

You will get material you never would have had on your own. And you can weave multiple perspectives into the eulogy: “His daughter told me he...” “A friend of thirty years said...”

This is not cheating. This is how journalism works. You are gathering primary sources and weaving them into a narrative. The eulogy becomes richer because it contains more than one viewpoint.

What Not To Do

Do not pretend you were closer than you were. The family knows. The room knows. False intimacy is worse than honest distance.

Do not pad with generic praise. “He was a wonderful person who will be deeply missed” is the eulogy equivalent of a participation trophy. It costs nothing and means nothing.

Do not make it about you. “I wish I had gotten to know him better” is about your regret, not their life. Focus outward.

Do not apologize for your distance. “I did not know her as well as some of you” -- the room does not need your disclaimer. They need your contribution.

The Short Eulogy Is Fine

If you only have 2 minutes of genuine material, give 2 minutes. A short, honest speech is infinitely better than a padded one.

The worst eulogies I have ever encountered are not the short ones. They are the ones where someone had 3 minutes of real content and stretched it to 8 with filler. The room can feel the padding. They start thinking about the parking meter.

Target: 300-500 words for a “barely knew them” speech. That is 2-3 minutes. Enough to be meaningful, short enough to be honest about your scope.

Use the Tool

Our eulogy generator which works especially well for this situation. The 8 questions force you to find the specific details you do have, even if you did not think you had them.

You might not know their three words immediately. But sit with it. Think about the two or three interactions you had. Something will surface. Their laugh. The way they greeted you. The one time they said something that stuck.

That is enough. That is always enough.

The tool gives you a structured draft in 5 minutes. Then you edit it to be honest about your relationship while still honoring the person. That combination — structure plus honesty — is exactly what this situation requires.

Free. 2 generations per day. 4 tones. Full editor.

You were asked because someone believed you could do this. They were right.

— 8

When we built the eulogy generator at DeathNote, one of the earliest design decisions was tone selection. Not as an afterthought or a dropdown menu. As a core feature.

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Because a eulogy for a grandmother at a traditional church service is a fundamentally different piece of writing than a eulogy for a best friend at a backyard memorial. Same love. Same loss. Completely different voice.

This post breaks down the 4 tones we offer, when to use each one, and how the same set of memories produces radically different speeches.

Why Tone Matters More Than Words

Most eulogy advice focuses on content: what stories to tell, what memories to share, what structure to use. That matters. But tone is the thing that determines whether the room feels the eulogy or just hears it.

Tone is the difference between:

• “He was a man of quiet strength” (formal).

• “Dad never said much, but when he did, you listened” (personal).

• “He had this steady calm that made everyone around him feel safe” (reflective).

• “He was the rock — and he knew it, and he loved being it” (celebratory).

Same man. Same quality. Four completely different emotional registers. So, let’s take a look at what those 4 tones are and an overview of how we designed our tones to carefully capture the right mood.

Reflective Tone

Voice: Quiet, contemplative, measured. Pauses between thoughts. Draws the room inward.

Best for: Traditional services. When the loss is raw. When the person was introspective themselves. When you want the room to sit with the weight of the absence.

Characteristics:

• Longer sentences with deliberate rhythm.

• Present-tense reflections (”I still hear her voice when...”).

• Emphasis on meaning over events.

• Comfortable with silence and space.

Example opening:

There are some people whose presence you do not fully appreciate until it is gone. My mother was not one of them. I appreciated her every single day. I just did not know how to say it loudly enough.

When to avoid: If the person was loud, funny, larger-than-life. A reflective tone for someone who was the life of every party can feel like a mismatch.

Celebratory Tone

Voice: Warm, uplifting, sometimes funny. Focused on the life that was lived, not the loss. Gives the room permission to smile.

Best for: Memorials and celebrations of life. When the person would have hated a somber affair. When the family wants to remember joy. When there are kids in the room.

Characteristics:

• Shorter, punchier sentences

• Humor used with care (laughing with, never at)

• Stories focused on vitality and joy

• Forward-looking: what they would want for us now

• Energy that lifts the room rather than settling it

Example opening:

If my dad could see all of you sitting here looking sad, he would be furious. He would tell you to knock it off, go get a beer, and tell him a good story. So that is exactly what I am going to do.

When to avoid: When the death was sudden or traumatic and the room is not ready for lightness. Read the family’s temperature first.

Formal Tone

Voice: Structured, dignified, traditional. The voice you hear at state funerals and religious services. Carries weight through cadence and restraint.

Best for: Religious ceremonies. Military services. Large funerals with diverse attendees who may not know each other. When the family expects tradition.

Characteristics:

• Structured paragraphs with clear transitions

• Third-person references common (”John was a man who...”)

• Measured language, no slang or casual phrasing

• Acknowledgment of the setting and the community

• May incorporate religious or philosophical references

Example opening:

We gather today to honor the life of John Michael Anderson -- a devoted husband of forty-three years, a father who shaped three lives with patience and purpose, and a man whose integrity was evident in everything he did.

When to avoid: Small, intimate gatherings where this register feels stiff. If the person was informal and would have rolled their eyes at formality.

Personal Tone

Voice: Direct, honest, conversational. Speaking to the room the way you would speak to a friend. The most emotionally naked of the four tones.

Best for: Small gatherings. When you were very close to the person. When authenticity matters more than polish. When you want the room to feel like they are hearing a real human, not a performance.

Characteristics:

• First-person throughout (”I remember,” “she told me,” “we used to”)

• Sentence fragments and natural speech patterns

• Emotional honesty, including difficult feelings

• Specific, unpolished details (the kind you would not put in a formal speech)

• Feels like a conversation, not a presentation

Example opening:

I have rewritten this six times. Every version sounded like someone else talking. So I am just going to tell you what I know. My sister was my favorite person on this planet, and I do not know how to be here without her.

When to avoid: Very large or formal settings where this level of intimacy might not land. If you are speaking on behalf of an organization rather than as an individual.

The Same Memory, 4 Ways

Here is how tone transforms identical content.

The memory: She made the best chocolate chip cookies and would always have a batch ready when you visited.

Here’s how our tool would present them based on your desired tone:

Reflective Tone:

There was a ritual to visiting her house. Before you even reached the door, you could smell the chocolate chips. She never asked if you wanted cookies. She simply knew that the act of baking them was its own kind of love language, spoken without words, understood completely.

Celebratory Tone:

You could not walk into that woman’s house without gaining three pounds. Chocolate chip cookies. Every single time. Fresh out of the oven, like she had some kind of sensor that detected you pulling into the driveway. It was her superpower and she wielded it shamelessly.

Formal Tone:

Among her many gifts was a remarkable talent for making others feel welcome. Visitors to her home were invariably greeted with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies — a small gesture that spoke to her deep and consistent generosity of spirit.

Personal Tone:

She always had cookies ready. Always. I do not know how she timed it. I would show up unannounced and there they were, still warm. I asked her once how she always knew. She said she did not know. She just always had a batch going because you never know who might need one. That was my mom.

Same cookies. Same love. Four completely different emotional experiences.

How to Choose

Ask yourself:

1. What was the person like? Match their energy.

2. What is the setting? Church vs. backyard matters.

3. What does the family need? Sometimes they tell you. Listen.

4. What can you deliver? If you will cry (and you might), personal and celebratory are easier to recover from mid-speech than formal.

Here’s a hot tip that we’ve seen our users try: Generate in all 4 tones and read them aloud. Your gut will tell you which one is right. You will feel it in your chest.

The right tone is the one that sounds like truth. The wrong tone is the one that sounds like performance. Trust your gut.

— 8

As you know, we’ve built a free AI eulogy generator and today I’m going to review the entire category, including my own tool, and be honest about all of it.

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If you googled “best AI eulogy generator” or “ChatGPT eulogy” and ended up here — good! This is the post that tells you the truth about what these tools can and cannot do and how you can think about them properly.

The Current Landscape

There are roughly three categories of AI eulogy tools right now:

1. ChatGPT / Claude / generic AI chatbots — You open ChatGPT, type “write a eulogy for my mother,” and get something back. Free, easy, immediate.

2. Dedicated eulogy generator websites — Purpose-built tools with forms, templates, and structured inputs. Some free, some paid. Varying quality.

3. Template-based tools — Fill-in-the-blank templates where you swap in names and details. The AI equivalent of a Mad Lib.

We have tested them all. Here is what we found.

ChatGPT: The Default Choice

Most people start here because it is the tool they already know.

What it does well:

• Produces grammatically correct, well-structured text.

• Can follow tone instructions (”make it more celebratory”).

• Fast iteration — you can keep prompting until you get closer.

• Free (or already paid for).

Where it falls apart:

• It does not know what to ask you. You get out what you put in, and most people do not know what to put in. “Write a eulogy for my dad Jeff, he was kind and loved fishing” produces a generic fishing eulogy that could be about anyone’s dad.

• The default output is unmistakably AI. Certain phrases show up every time: “a life well-lived,” “left an indelible mark,” “his legacy lives on.” These are the hallmarks of machine text and everyone in that funeral will recognize them.

• No structure. It generates a wall of text. You need to manually edit it in a separate tool.

• No tone control beyond prompting. “Make it more personal” is vague and the results are inconsistent.

• No word count targeting. You might get 200 words or 1,200 words.

Verdict: Good for brainstorming. Bad as a final product without heavy editing.

Dedicated Eulogy Generators: The Spectrum

We tested a dozen of these. They range from genuinely useful to barely functional.

The bad ones:

• Ask for name + relationship + a couple sentences, then generate something almost identical to raw ChatGPT output.

• Some charge $10-30 for what is essentially a wrapper around a basic AI prompt.

• No editing tools. Generate, copy, done. Hope you like it.

• Several are clearly SEO farms — the eulogy generator is a landing page play, not a real product.

The better ones (including ours) share a few traits:

• Structured inputs. Instead of a blank text box, they ask specific questions that guide you toward providing the details that make a eulogy personal.

• Tone options. You can specify the emotional register.

• Editing capabilities. A built-in editor so you can refine the output.

• Word count awareness. Targeting the 500-800 word sweet spot for a 3-5 minute speech.

Ultimately, it’s up to you of course.

How DeathNote’s Eulogy Generator Works

Of course we are biased, so we’ll just describe the design decisions and you can be the judge:

• 8 specific questions. Not “tell me about the person.” Specific prompts: three words that describe them, one specific memory, something they always said, what brought them joy, their gift to others. These force specificity. You cannot answer “something they always said” with a generic response. You have to actually remember.

• 4 tone presets. Reflective, celebratory, formal, personal. Each produces meaningfully different output. Same memories, different voice.

• Full rich-text editor. Bold, italics, lists. Word count and estimated speaking time displayed live. The generated text is a starting point — the editor is where you make it yours.

• Print preview. You can see exactly what the page will look like when you print it. Because you will probably be holding a printed page at the podium, not your phone.

• Free tier. 2 generations per day. No credit card. We make money from the broader DeathNote platform (death notes, proof-of-life verification, encrypted delivery), not from charging grieving people for a eulogy.

We know that our system works well but we ultimately want everyone to use what works and allowing you to deliver a personal message that you’re happy and comfortable with.

And that’s already a challenge!

What No AI Eulogy Generator Can Do

None of these tools — ours included — can replace the genuine, unpolished, deeply personal eulogy that comes from someone who loved the person and took the time to write from the heart.

AI cannot know:

• The inside joke only your family understands.

• The exact inflection your mother used when she said “oh, for heaven’s sake”.

• The way your father’s hands looked when he was working in the garden.

• The thing you never told anyone about the person but need to say now.

The best use of any AI eulogy tool is as scaffolding. It gives you structure, it gives you a starting point, it breaks you past the blank page. Then you put your real self into it.

The worst use is treating the AI output as a finished product and reading it verbatim. Everyone in that room will know.

Not because AI is bad at writing — but because the eulogy will be missing the one thing that matters most: You.

Our Recommendation

If you need to write a eulogy right now:

1. Start with a tool. Any tool. Ours, ChatGPT, a template. The blank page is the enemy. Get past it.

2. Add your specifics. The real memories, the real phrases, the real moments. The AI gave you a skeleton. You add the flesh.

3. Read it aloud. Multiple times. Edit until it sounds like something you would actually say. If any sentence sounds “AI-ish,” rewrite it in your own words.

4. Keep it to 3-5 minutes. 500-800 words. The room will thank you.

5. Print it. Paper. Not your phone.

If you want to try our approach, you can check it out here. 8 questions, 4 tones, full editor. Totally Free.

If you prefer ChatGPT, here is a better prompt than what most people use — fill in the brackets [ ] with whatever you might need:

Write a 600-word eulogy for [name], who was my [relationship].

We knew each other for [time].

Three words that describe them: [words].

One specific memory: [memory].

Something they always said: [phrase].

What brought them joy: [thing].

Their gift to others: [quality].

Tone: [reflective/celebratory/formal/personal].

That prompt structure is basically our 8 questions fed into ChatGPT. You will get better output than “write a eulogy for my dad.”

We are giving away the recipe because the point was never to lock you into our tool. The point is to help you write a good eulogy. However you get there.

— 8

This is the post I wish existed when I first started thinking about eulogies. Not the “top 10 tips” listicle. Not the AI-generated content farm version. The real, practical guide for someone who has been asked to write a eulogy and does not know where to begin.

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If you are reading this because you actually need to write one right now — I am sorry for your loss. Let us get you through this.

Start With This Truth

You do not need to be a writer to give a good eulogy.

The best eulogies are not literary masterpieces. They are specific, honest, and personal. A three-minute talk where you tell one real story about someone is infinitely better than a ten-minute polished speech full of generic praise.

Nobody at that funeral wants to hear that your father was “a wonderful man who touched many lives.” They want to hear about the time he drove three hours in a snowstorm to bring you soup when you had the flu.

They want the specific thing. The real thing.

The Blank Page Problem

Here is why eulogy writing is so hard: you are being asked to summarize an entire human being while your brain is fogged by grief. The scope is paralyzing. Where do you even start?

The answer is: do not try to summarize them. Pick one thread and pull it.

If you try to cover everything -- their career, their personality, their achievements, their relationships, their legacy -- you will produce something that sounds like a Wikipedia article. Instead, pick the one thing that was most essentially them, and build outward from there.

A Framework That Works

I have seen hundreds of eulogies come through our generator at this point. The ones that work best follow a pattern. Here it is:

Part 1: The Hook (30 seconds)

Open with something specific. Not “We are here today to celebrate the life of...” — everyone already knows why they are there.

Instead, this is a better approach:

• A thing they always said (”My mom’s answer to every problem was ‘well, let’s just figure it out then’”)

• A quick scene (”The last time I saw my dad truly happy, he was burning pancakes on a Sunday morning and singing off-key”)

• A direct statement (”My brother was the funniest person I have ever known, and I am not exaggerating”)

You have 30 seconds before the room decides whether to lean in or zone out. Give them something real.

Part 2: The Portrait (2-3 minutes)

This is the body. Tell 2-3 stories that show who this person was. Not accomplishments. Not a resume. Stories.

The stories should be:

• Specific — Names, places, details. “One Tuesday in March” is better than “one time.”

• Sensory — What did they look like doing this? What did the room smell like? What were they wearing?

• Revealing — Each story should show a quality, not just narrate an event. The pancake story is not about pancakes. It is about joy.

Connect the stories. They should feel like facets of the same person, not random anecdotes.

Part 3: The Gift (30 seconds)

End with what they gave you. What they gave the room. What the world lost.

This is not the place for platitudes. This is the place for the one sentence you have been carrying in your chest since they died. Say that thing.

“She made everyone feel like the most important person in the room, and I do not know how to walk into a room without her.”

That kind of thing. The true thing.

How Long Should a Eulogy Be?

From our experience — and from what seems to be generally accepted as a good range of length and time — 3-5 minutes. 500-800 words.

This is not a rule. It is a sweet spot based on attention spans, emotional capacity, and the fact that there are usually other speakers. If you go under 3 minutes, it can feel rushed. Over 7 minutes and you are asking a grieving room to hold focus for longer than most of them can.

Time yourself reading it aloud. Read slower than you think you should -- grief has a way of making people rush.

Common Mistakes

A few common issues that can get in the way of what you’re trying to share:

• Trying to be comprehensive. You cannot cover their entire life. Do not try. Pick the thread that matters most.

• Being too generic. “He was a loving father and husband” could apply to millions of people. What was specific about how he loved?

• Apologizing. Do not open with “I am not a great public speaker” or “I do not know if I can get through this.” You will get through it. The room is on your side.

• Quoting poetry or famous people when your own words would be better. Shakespeare did not know your grandmother. You did.

• Waiting until the last minute. If you can, write a draft 2-3 days before. Sleep on it. Read it again. Edit. The version you write at 2am the night before the funeral is never as good as the version you had time to sit with.

I think the most important thing to remember is that everyone is there for the same reason and they support you doing this (so that they do not have to).

What If You Cry?

You probably will. That is fine. Everyone expects it. Nobody judges it.

Pause. Breathe. Take a sip of water. Continue.

If you cannot continue, it is okay to hand the paper to someone else and let them finish reading it for you. This is not a failure. This is a human being having a human moment at a funeral. It is the most appropriate response possible.

Bring a printed copy. Do not read from your phone -- your hands will shake and you will lose your place. Paper is more forgiving.

The Shortcut

If the blank page is still winning and you need something now, here is the fastest path I know: Answer these 8 questions about the person:

1. Their name

2. Your relationship to them

3. How long you knew them

4. Three words that describe them

5. One specific memory

6. Something they always said

7. What brought them joy

8. Their gift to others

Write one paragraph for each answer. You now have a eulogy.

Or use our Free Eulogy Generator — it takes those same 8 questions and builds a structured, editable eulogy in about 5 minutes. You can generate in 4 different tones (reflective, celebratory, formal, personal) and edit the result with a full rich-text editor.

I built it because I believe nobody should have to fight a blank page while they are grieving. The blank page can wait. The grief cannot.

One More Thing

If you are reading this and you are not currently grieving — if you found this article because you are curious, or planning ahead, or just thinking about mortality — consider writing something now.

I know, that might feel super strange but I’ve found that after being in this industry “of death” that encountering it earlier and more often can profoundly help when these do inevitably arise.

It’s not that you have to become comfortable with it; but, you can be more prepared.

There’s a “strategic” reason as well. For instance, write the eulogy for your parent while they are still alive. Not because you are morbid. Because right now you can think clearly, you can call them and ask what their favorite memory is, you can take your time and get the words right.

The version you write today, with a clear head and a full heart, will always be better than the version you write through tears at 2am.

That is the whole idea behind DeathNote. Prepare while you can. Deliver when it matters.

— 8

DeathNote now has a free eulogy generator. You answer 8 questions, pick a tone, and get a full eulogy you can edit, print, and deliver. It takes about 5 minutes.

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This post is about why it exists, how it works, and what happened when real people started using it.

The Problem

Someone you love dies. Within days — sometimes hours — someone asks you to stand up in front of everyone and say something meaningful about their life.

You are grieving. You cannot think clearly. You open a blank document and stare at it. Maybe you google “how to write a eulogy” and get a wall of generic advice: “Start with a memorable anecdote.” Great. You are mid-grief and someone is telling you to brainstorm anecdotes.

The existing tools are not much better. Most eulogy generators are either glorified Mad Libs (”Insert name here, insert relationship here, press generate”) or they hand you a ChatGPT prompt and call it a product. The output reads like it was written by a machine, because it was. No specificity. No warmth. No actual connection to the person who died.

We wanted to build something different. Something actually designed for this unique and sensitive moment. We knew we could do it better.

The 8-Question Framework

Instead of asking people to write, we ask them to remember.

Eight questions. That is it. Nothing hard or complex:

1. What was their name?

2. What was your relationship?

3. How long did you know them?

4. Three words that describe them

5. One specific memory

6. Something they always said

7. What brought them joy

8. What was their gift to others

These are not writing prompts. They are memory prompts. You do not need to be a writer to answer them. You do not need to organize your thoughts or worry about structure. You just need to remember.

The generator takes those 8 answers and builds a eulogy around them. Your words, your memories, structured into something you can actually stand up and read.

Why 4 Tones Matter

Grief is not one-size-fits-all. Neither are funerals.

Some families want solemn. Some want to laugh. Some want formal reverence. Some want raw, personal honesty. A eulogy generator that only produces one flavor is going to miss for most people.

So we built 4 tone options:

• Reflective and Thoughtful — Quiet, thoughtful, contemplative

• Celebratory and Uplifting — Warm, uplifting, focused on the life lived

• Formal and Dignified — Traditional, structured, respectful

• Personal and Warm — Intimate, conversational, emotionally direct

Same memories, different voice. You can generate in all 4 and pick the one that feels right. Or mix and match paragraphs in the full editor.

The Editor

This is the part most eulogy generators skip entirely.

A generated eulogy is a starting point, not a finished product. You need to be able to edit it. Add a paragraph. Remove a line that does not feel right. Adjust the wording until it sounds like something you would actually say.

Our editor is a full rich-text editor. Bold, italics, lists, formatting. Word count. Estimated speaking time (most eulogies land between 3-5 minutes, which is 500-800 words). Print preview so you can see exactly what you will hold at the podium. Copy to clipboard for pasting into your phone’s notes app.

These details matter because the person using this tool is having one of the worst days of their life. Every friction point is cruelty. Every smooth interaction is a small kindness.

What Happened Next

We launched the eulogy generator quietly. No marketing, no ads. Just a page at off our main site and some basic SEO.

Within weeks, people started finding it through Google. “Free eulogy generator.” “AI eulogy generator.” “How to write a eulogy.” The search volume surprised us — thousands of people every month are searching for help writing eulogies.

Of course they are. It is one of the hardest writing tasks anyone faces, and it happens at the worst possible time.

Then something else happened. Our first paying customer signed up. Not because of the death note feature. Not because of proof-of-life verification or encrypted messages. Because of the eulogy generator.

They used the free tool, wrote a eulogy for their father, and then signed up for the full platform. They wanted to write their own death notes while they were still alive, so their family would not have to go through what they just went through.

That is the loop. Grief brings people in. Preparation keeps them.

The Honest Limitations

The AI generates good first drafts. It does not generate perfect eulogies.

Here is what it cannot do:

• It cannot know inside jokes that only you and the person shared

• It cannot capture the exact way someone laughed or the specific phrase they used when they were annoyed

• It cannot replace the raw, imperfect honesty of someone speaking from the heart

What it can do is give you a structure, a starting point, and enough momentum to get past the blank page. The best eulogies we’ve seen come through our tool are the ones where someone generated a draft and then spent 20 minutes making it theirs.

That is the design intent. Not AI replacing human expression. AI scaffolding it.

Try It

1. Go to deathnote.ai/eulogy

2. Answer 8 questions about someone you want to honor

3. Pick a tone

4. Edit until it sounds like you

5. Print it or copy it to your phone

Free. No account required to read about it. 2 free generations per day on the free tier.

If you have already given a eulogy and wish you had this tool at the time — we’re sorry it was not there sooner. If you are planning ahead and want to write something now while you can think clearly — that is exactly what DeathNote is for.

— 8

A little over a week ago, I wrote about hitting 16 languages and 30,000 pages in the DeathNote library. That felt like a milestone.

Then we kept going.

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The library now exists in 50 languages! Every single page has its own sitemap entry, correct OpenGraph locale, and canonical URL. Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew render right-to-left. Georgian uses its own script. Tamil, Bengali, and Thai all display natively.

This is not a marketing exercise. If you are planning for the end of your life and you speak Tamil or Icelandic or Welsh, you should be able to read about it in your language.

The 34 New Languages

Since the last post, we added:

• Persian, Hebrew — Completing RTL support alongside Arabic. Three right-to-left languages, each with its own rendering behavior.

• Vietnamese, Czech, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Swedish — One at a time, each through the full pipeline. Ukrainian was personal with millions of displaced families with urgent legacy planning needs.

• Then the floodgates opened with Romanian, Greek, Danish, Finnish, Bosnian, Albanian, Catalan, Macedonian, Bengali, Estonian, Latvian, Filipino, Tamil, Swahili, Icelandic, Welsh, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Slovak, Bulgarian, Croatian, Thai, Malay, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Georgian.

All of them. Same pipeline, same quality bar, same focus: Help more of our users and community members find our free service and use it for their friends, family, and loved ones (including all pets)!

It’s fun to think about our progress as well! Just 5 or 6 months ago we only had english and we shared a few thoughts about starting this process with Japanese and Spanish. Since then, we’ve gone so much farther.

What Else We Shipped

While the translation work was happening, we also did a round of behind-the-scenes hardening. This is the less flashy stuff that keeps the platform reliable when it actually matters.

• Your check-in reminders got smarter. — The system that sends you “hey, check in” emails now uses deterministic keys to make sure you never get the same reminder twice, even if the system runs multiple times. If DeathNote sends you a reminder, it was intentional and it was exactly one.

• Delivery got more durable. — When the time comes and your death note needs to be sent, that process now runs through a proper job queue. Each delivery attempt is tracked, retries are automatic, and nothing gets lost between steps. The system knows exactly what was sent, what is pending, and what needs another try.

• The editor protects your work. — The note editor now warns you before you navigate away with unsaved changes. It also handles page reloads gracefully so you do not lose what you were writing. Small thing, big deal when you are composing the most important message you will ever write.

• We audit ourselves. — We ran a full internal audit on everything -- cron job reliability, notification paths, webhook handling, database security boundaries, test coverage. Found a few rough edges, fixed them all, and documented the patterns so future work follows the same standards.

Making our system more robust for the long-term is the goal. And every week we’re creating small performance gains that ultimately bring value to our users.

Iteration by iteration. Step by step.

-- 8

The DeathNote library now exists in 16 languages. 1,897 pages each. 30,352 total URLs. Every page has its own sitemap entry, OpenGraph locale, and canonical URL structure.

This post covers what we shipped, how we built it, and why a digital legacy platform needs to speak more than English.

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Why This Matters

Death is not an English-speaking event.

When someone passes away, the people left behind need guidance in their language. Not translated-by-committee corporate documentation — real, readable content that makes sense in context. Legal terminology, cultural expectations around death preparation, estate planning vocabulary -- all of it needs to work natively.

DeathNote’s library is 1,897 pages of reference material covering end-of-life planning, digital legacy management, and practical guidance for families. If that content only exists in English, we’re only useful to a fraction of the people who need it.

Consequently, we started with 9 languages as the initial baseline: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, and Chinese. These represent the larger language communities so it made sense to start there.

Then we expanded. The recent additions:

1. Russian — 258M internet users, the 8th most-used language online

2. Arabic — 400M+ speakers across 25 countries, right-to-left rendering

3. Hindi — 600M+ speakers, India’s rapidly growing internet population

4. Turkish — 85M speakers, bridge between European and Asian digital markets

5. Polish — 45M speakers, one of the largest EU language communities

6. Indonesian — 210M speakers, Southeast Asia’s largest internet market

Each language went through the same pipeline: Split into 127 translation batches, translate, merge, deduplicate, generate sitemaps, integrate into the app route, and verify every page loads.

What’s Next

We have a roadmap to 50 languages. The next tier includes Vietnamese, Czech, Ukrainian, Persian, Hungarian, Swedish, Romanian, Greek, Danish, and Finnish.

Ukrainian is worth calling out specifically with 6 million+ wartime diaspora spread across Europe. Legacy planning has an urgency there that most markets don’t. That one is not just an SEO play.

If your language is not on the list yet, it will be! Every page. Every language. Same content, native reading experience and the same great service that our community loves to use.

— 8

So Meta got a patent. It’s weird. Trust me on this. They are so weird.

What is it? It’s a patent that lets an AI keep posting on your behalf after you die. Liking photos. Commenting on posts. Responding to DMs.

Basically a digital ghost that pretends to be you because, and I’m quoting the actual patent here, your followers’ “user experience will be affected” by your absence.

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Let that sink in for a second.

Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, is the primary author. The patent was filed in 2023 and granted in December. Meta says they have “no plans to move forward” with it, which is what every company says about a patent they absolutely want to keep in their back pocket.

I’ve been thinking about this all week. Not because it’s competition — it’s not. But because it crystallizes something I’ve been wrestling with since I started building DeathNote.

Two Very Different Philosophies

Meta’s approach is to train an AI on your likes, comments, and behavior — then let it simulate you. The patent literally says it would handle video and audio calls. With dead people. Or at least, an AI that sounds like them.

DeathNote’s approach is the opposite. You sit down. You think about what matters. You write it yourself. You choose who gets it. And when the time comes, your actual words get delivered to the people you love.

One is a simulation. The other is a letter.

I don’t think there’s a debate about which one is more meaningful.

The Business of Grief

The article from Business Insider profiles a growing category they’re calling “grief tech” — startups like Replika, YOV, and others building tools around loss. This is so ick I can’t even stand it. Microsoft patented their own version of this back in 2021. Now Meta. The space is getting crowded and it’s getting mainstream.

Here’s another thing I find interesting: Every expert quoted in the article has concerns about AI simulating the dead. A sociology professor at UVA said, plainly, “Let the dead be dead.” And I agree. But I’d add something.

Let the dead be heard.

There’s a difference between an AI guessing what your mom would’ve said and reading the actual words she wrote for you. One is a parlor trick. The other is a gift.

Why This Matters for Us

I’m not going to pretend Meta’s patent doesn’t validate what we’re building. It does. When the CTO of a $1.5 trillion company authors a patent in your category, the market is real.

But validation isn’t the point. The point is that Big Tech will always optimize for engagement. More content. More data. More interaction. That’s the incentive structure. The patent says it explicitly — if you stop posting, the platform suffers.

We don’t have that incentive. DeathNote isn’t about keeping you “active” after you die. It’s about giving you a way to say what matters while you still can. And then respecting the silence after.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

The Ethical Line

I think about this a lot. Building in the death space means every feature decision carries weight. Should we add AI that writes your final messages for you? Technically, we could. We already have AI for eulogy drafts. But there’s a line between helping someone find the words and putting words in their mouth after they’re gone.

We’re staying on this side of that line.

Your messages are yours. Written by you. Encrypted by us. Delivered when it matters.

No ghost bots. No simulations. No AI pretending to be you in a group chat.

I don’t know if Meta will ever build what’s in that patent. Maybe they will. Maybe they’ll roll it out quietly as an opt-in feature on Instagram and people will sign up without reading the fine print, the way we all do.

And I certainly don’t trust them.

But if they do, I think people will eventually want something different. Something that doesn’t simulate the dead but honors them. Something that lets you say goodbye on your own terms.

That’s what we’re building. And it already works.

Talk soon,

— 8

A quick update as we’ve expanded our sign-in options from 4 to 8! So now you have a few clear and obvious choices, backed by the best security in the business!

• Google

• Apple

• LinkedIn

• Microsoft

• Twitter

• Facebook

• GitHub

• Discord

And, of course, your trusty Email and Password if you don’t want to use any of these easy, one-click oAuths! Millions use Outlook, Teams, and live in the Microsoft ecosystem. Twitter has hundreds of millions and Facebook has 3 billion who use it daily. One tap, no new passwords to create, store, or reset!

Subscribe now

Why This Matters

I think a lot about the gap between intention and actually doing something and for a lot of folks this is the tension when it comes to planning for death. No one wants to think about it but everyone knows it’s coming.

So, reducing the friction for our users and community is what this is all about. Making things easy because the topics are already so hard.

If you already have an account you can use any of these providers as well! It’ll stay connected to your authentication of choic so that you will always have access.

Security Stays Tight

More sign-in options doesn’t mean less security. Every OAuth provider we support uses industry-standard protocols. Your authentication is handled by companies that spend billions on security infrastructure — Google, Apple, Microsoft — and we never see or store your password.

And, of course, your final messages remain encrypted. Your verification schedule stays private. Your contacts remain yours. We simply added more front doors to the same vault. We’ll keep it lock down for you and for the one’s you love.

That’s it! A simple update but an important one. Keep on living strong!

— 8

I hope you had a wonderful New Year’s celebration! Whatever your tradition, I hope you celebrated life because the clock is ticking!

Sidenote: I finally shipped the Terminal App that I’ve been using to build DeathNote and a newsletter too for updates:

Digital Onigiri

Updates on Building a Modern Terminal App

By 8Lee

If this is your thing, then check it out!

Ok, so back to the updates!

It’s been a few weeks since the last update, and most of what we’ve been doing isn’t the kind of thing that makes for flashy screenshots. No new animations. No redesigned dashboards. Just the quiet, methodical work of making something that is already good a little bit better.

Sounds like building software.

And that’s the thing about building software you want to last. Sometimes the most important work is simply invisible. But let me at least tell you what we’ve been working on behind the scenes!

Eulogy History

You can now view your past eulogy generations! Every time you use our AI to help draft something, it’s saved — timestamped, organized, scrollable. This wasn’t a requested feature, exactly. It came from a conversation with a user who mentioned they’d generated something beautiful, closed the tab, and couldn’t remember exactly what they’d written.

That moment of loss stuck with me. Now it won’t happen again. And for those who need more generation (without limits) you can now upgrade to create as many as you may need. These are important moments so you want to get it right.

Documentation Consolidation

This one’s embarrassing to admit: we had too much documentation. Over 14,000 lines of it. Spread across files that duplicated each other, referenced things that no longer existed, and generally made finding anything a chore.

I cut it down by 84%.

Not by removing useful information — by recognizing that good code documents itself, and that a solo developer doesn’t need enterprise-grade specification documents (for everything). I need what I need and nothing more, especially now that it’s been working for a while and folks are happy!

Testing Overhaul

We went from 116 tests to 27. Before you panic: We didn’t just delete tests. We removed the redundant ones. Tests that tested tests. Tests for features that no longer exist (for whatever reason).

What’s left is a tight suite of essential E2E tests running against real infrastructure with real credentials. No mocks. If it passes, it works. If it doesn’t, something’s actually broken.

User Experience Improvements

A lot here so we’ll be quick:

• Responsive Everything: The editor toolbar now adapts to smaller screens. The Save button shortens its text. The verify/pause buttons stack on mobile. Footer links hide on tablets. None of this is revolutionary—it’s just the kind of polish that means the difference between “this feels professional” and “this feels like it was built by someone who only owns a 27-inch monitor.”

• Dark Mode Contrast: We bumped up the contrast on destructive and success colors in dark mode. WCAG AA compliance. Your eyes will thank us, even if you don’t notice the change.

• Print Preview Simplification: We had a custom print preview modal. It was beautiful. It was also completely unnecessary when browsers have had a perfectly good print preview for decades. So we deleted it and now you just get native browser print. Less code, same functionality, fewer things to break.

• Icon Centering: Icons are now properly centered on mobile. This is the kind of bug that would have taken me three months to even notice if someone hadn’t pointed it out. Now they float exactly where they should.

• Removed Shinigami Theme System: This was the saddest removal but an important one for just “growing up” as maturing as a professional business. Sure, I love Misa, Ryuk, Light, and all the anime references but the reality is that most of our customers have no idea what that is.

Removing it was a good idea. My partner suggested in months ago and I dragged my feet on this for longer than I should have. Thanks BB!

Looking Ahead

I’ve been watching a viral Chinese app called Demumu (formerly “Are You Dead Yet”) blow up. Their value proposition is remarkably simple: Check in daily, and if you miss two days, your emergency contact gets notified.

It’s positioned around loneliness and “being noticed” rather than death — a softer, more approachable framing that resonates with the 125 million single-person households in urban China.

Here’s the thing: We already have 100% of the infrastructure for this. Our proof-of-life system does exactly this, just with longer intervals and more features. So we’re exploring a new tier called Pulse — a stripped-down, affordable entry point for people who want daily check-ins without the full death-planning experience.

I’m still in the research phase so if you have thoughts about this I’d love to hear them! I’m still very much figuring out the right pricing and positioning. But the competitive analysis has been fascinating, and I’ll share more when there’s something to show.

By the Numbers

Since the last update:

• 84% documentation reduction

• 76% test suite consolidation (116 → 27)

• 13,300 SEO redirect issues fixed

• 16 email templates (unchanged, but verified)

• 25 API endpoints (unchanged, but all documented)

• 0 customer support tickets requiring intervention

That last one is still my favorite metric. I hope it doesn’t get larger than zero! The work never stops, but the good news is: The foundation is solid. Most of what we’re doing now is refinement. Polishing edges. Tightening screws. Making something that works into something that works well.

The best improvements are the ones you don’t notice because everything just… kind of… works. Imagine that.

Talk soon,

— Eight

I’m Christmas Eve and so I finally have some time to pen a few non-AI-generated notes to our small (but growing!) community of users who are now better prepared for the inevitable.

Over the last few months I honestly haven’t had to do much other than review the any updated packages, libraries, and breaking changes that might be made as a result. For those that have no idea what I’m talking about it’s pretty simple: I’m doing routine maintenance on our system — like getting an old change for your car — and ensuring that everything is in tip-top shape.

In other words, our solid foundation gives us confidence and peace of mind that the fundamental service will never fail, at least in terms of the things we can control.

Consequently, this has allowed me and my partner to hammer on the few things that are less important technically but can ultimately help clarify our brand, messaging, and our approach to this growing “Industry of Death”. Here are a few things that took a lot of time to think through:

1. We had a much more colorful approach originally with our H1 and text but moving that to all black was a much more “pro” move, even though I didn’t like the reduction of color. But, removing the colorations upscale our brand and make it much more easy to manage new pages that might be created where I was building unique color palettes every single time. No more.

2. We killed the global music player which was a retro-style Winamp built right into the app layer and I even had a mobile version that scaled nicely tiny the full frame. I had 80 tracks that played while you put your note together. This was a personal project that took way too much time to get right and it added unnecessary load and confusion. The reality is that no one is coming to DeathNote to listen to midi music from the 90’s. Goodbye.

3. Moved away from Twitter wholesale and that’s a huge win for us as it’s one less thing to manage and, most importantly, no one was coming to our site from Twitter / X and nearly 100% is coming from (programmatic) SEO work that has continued to grow our signups every single week. One less thing to manage and one less distraction for everyone. A very nice win.

4. Removing the obvious references to the Death Note anime series was hard for me since the anime was a huge part of the genesis of this work and one of my favorite series of all time. But, our implementation bloated the theme switcher and had tons of fancy animations that most users do not care about. I left one fun version of the animation here if you’d like to see it but the “Shinigami” theme is no longer available and we didn’t lose anyone in the transition.

Etc, etc, etc.

These are the more obvious examples but what’s most important to note is that these conversations started months ago, within weeks of us launching v1.0 and it took months of conversation and thinking to produce small but meaningful changes that we know will serve us on the short and long-term.

We’re not waiting around (and not hoping) that folks pass and that their death notes get sent out (although that’s happening as you can see in the screenshots) but we do want to make sure that our experience is always trustworthy, always consistent, always on time, as you’d expect.

The compounding effects of small thoughts and small conversations over a long enough timeframe is completely underrated. I suppose the key is that you need good conversation partner to make it all work and thankfully I’ve got one and our growing community that, occasionally, sends us really good feedback.

Onward my friends! Have a great Xmas and Happy New Year! Hopefully there won’t be any death notes sent in the next week.

— 8

To be honest, we don’t get many emails or customer support requests because our platform just works. Full stop. And, if I’m to be completely transparent, we’ve NEVER gotten one since we launched.

Until today.

This will seem like a brag but it’s really table stakes for a product like this: We’ve built a best-in-class, enterprise-grade system that — outside of something catastrophic (and outside of our control) — is bulletproof.

Why? Because protecting your data is precisely why we exist. Consequently, our growing customer base has been successfully using the product and no one has ever needed any support or help or guidance! If I take a small glance at a random block of time last week I can see emails and notifications firing off, just as expected:

Our users are getting notifications, upgrading to a paid plan, inviting others to receive Death Notes and even testing our the Memorial Pages. Good technology works as expected. Great technology feels magical when you know you’ve got the core experience figured out.

But back to the story.

One of our newer customers reached out and emailed us, wanting more info on the technology, the team, and our approach — very, very cool! Although a lot of the information could be found on the site, I have no problem answering and engaging one-on-one because this is how you build an even better product.

Connecting with customers isn’t hard but it can take time. But, in my experience, it’s always worth it. I never try to upsell or try to convince anyone that our implementation or tool is better and we even have a list of 20 or so “competitors” that we’ve studied for ourselves (and you can too).

Already our small team (of just 2) are considering these perspective seriously and I appreciate every touch point. Besides, if you can’t make customers happy with the service itself, maybe they can be happy with a timely and respectable response.

It’s not that hard to build a business when you connect with customers. Onward!

— Eight

Great software is boring software, meaning, software that just works day-in and day-out is always the goal for any technology team. In other words, it’s a good day when I don’t have to wake up to any fires (or anything close to that)!

But, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t large projects to tackle and work on and we’ve just started one of the largest projects to date since v1.0 released: Localization.

Localization has enormous benefits tactically and strategically, especially from an SEO perspective. But, more important to our team is the fact that this will make our platform much more accessible and useful for those where english is not their first and primary language.

We’re tackling Spanish and Japanese first and will test this in the coming week. After this, we’ll expand to other languages making it really easy (and automated) in the right spots and at the right time so that it just “works” as one would expect.

We’ll post an update when each language is fully baked and complete! Talk soon.

— 8

We aren’t really active on the socials except for Twitter and a number of obligatory networks so we can allow oAuth access (although we do have a formal LinkedIn page) and so our time is vastly concentrated on just making small updates and ensuring that our platform is as performant as possible.

I was tweeting the other day an image of our analytics and database and it’s honestly not that impressive and there’s not much usage, which is kind of the point.

Unlike other products where something like monthly active users might be important, those metrics are neither important nor exciting. The goal isn’t for a user to spend a lot of time on the site. Rather, just enough time to capture the important information and to add the right person as a trusted contact.

That’s it. Then, get back to living life which is kind of the point.

This tool and this business is not what most folks think but that’s a good thing because I don’t want most folks to think about it at all, ever. It’s so counter-intuitive that I love it.

Talk soon,

8

I spent the morning walking through some of the “heavier” parts of the app, which aren’t many to be honest as there are really only 2 views that require requests of any significance: The All Contacts Page and the Editor Page.

The former makes a number of requests to our database to verify the user and an assortment of other important properties like delivery dates, emails, and so forth. The requests are small but important.

Simplifying something that works always feels a bit precarious — why attempt to “fix” what isn’t fundamentally broken?

The short answer, at least for me, is about building trust with the user. So what if you think you can improve a sub-2 second load on the first view 100%? Well, if you put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a moment and imagine that you’ve just received an important notification to check-in and verify that you’re still alive — you’d want to get to that verification screen as fast as humanly possible, right? Any delay, even the smallest, can feel agonizing.

So this morning I set out on a quest to see if we could make any significant improvements that would make it feel even faster.

Fo starters, I applied a lazy loading (with suspense fallbacks) to reduce the bundle by 40%. This is approximately 150kb in size. I even used existing patterns so I didn’t have to create anything from scratch. Secondly, I consolidated API endpoints from 2 to 1 making it about 40-80ms faster on initial load. Essentially a parallel database query using a shared authentication. And thirdly, some “smart” cacheing for return visitors using an existing middleware pattern and a smaller TTL.

Does it feel faster now? I think so. Would most of our users even notice? Maybe not. But perhaps that’s because I’m paying closer attention than most.

And that’s the point (and a solid reminder to builders): We know what excellence is but oftentimes we ignore these signals and the accrual over time makes the product unremarkable and unfocused.

And you become less proud of what you’ve built and that’s the beginning of the end.

Talk soon,

Eight

I think of this small community often as I make small updates and fixes to our “digital dead man’s switch” (if you will) and most of these changes are extremely minor, like updating the small on-hover animation in the global header:

Yes, it was working fine but it wasn’t perfect and so a little change to the CSS, a review of the internal divs and we’ve got a much nicer and cleaner implementation. I even made the intentional decision to keep the green “indicator” light inside of the black outline to ensure a cleanliness throughout — just enough to know that you’re alive but not enough to break design.

And that’s kind of the point.

When we finished version 1.0 of the platform it was done, complete, finished. It had everything it needed and nothing more to create a solid foundation of functionality. Folks can sign-up easily and then create a death note and then add someone to be a recipient. Done and done.

Built on world class infrastructure, I built it in such a way where it could be handed off to my kids if I wanted — hopefully 30 or 40 years from now — exactly as it’s built today. You see, great software’s desire is to become “hardware” or technology that doesn’t have to change.

If you keep touching it, especially in fundamental ways, it means you haven’t quite built the underlying systems that really solve your customers problems. We built a system that lasts and calcifying software that works is the goal.

If you keep messing with a good thing then it’ll become bad. Or, it was never really good to begin with.

— 8

One of the things that we kind of obsess over — outside things like “end of times” for each of us (how morbid) — is making things incredibly easy, in every single way.

Every function call that I’ve written, every piece of logic or workflow, and every piece of design has been meticulously reviewed. I mean, it’s my baby. So, of course.

Creating over 2,000 unit tests for instance is the level of obsession that I have about all of this. A “unit test” is effectively the smallest possible test of any given piece of code. So, in our situation, every single element has coverage.

Why does that make things frictionless for our customers? Because it makes everything simple. And simplicity is the foundation of what makes anything “lack friction” — the more complex a system is the more friction is created (and opportunities for things to break).

So, one of the applications to this frictionless stance is building user registration systems that are quick, easy, and familiar. This is why we have so many oAuth integrations as you can see above — it makes registration and logging in super easy.

This effort took time (well, not much time) but the results have been fantastic as most folks choose to use this form over basic email (or even text message authentication, which we have and is a great security feature).

We even have Web3-centric wallets for even more security and privacy. I personally like those a lot. The system we use has the highest levels of encryption available to mankind and even shows you your last login system for faster authentication:

This obsession is a driving force because death is very, very complex and complicated and emotional; you want to make systems surrounding this event as simple as possible.

For you and everyone else’s sake.

Chat soon,

— 8