Frequently Asked Questions

We'd never just disappear with your capsules. If we ever had to wind the service down, we commit to two things: we'll warn you well in advance, and we'll release every pending capsule early — delivering your messages ahead of their date rather than letting them be lost. You'd get your memories back, not a dead link. The honest reason we'd ever stop: the only thing that could force it is the running cost (the company and the servers). We keep that cost deliberately low, and we'd seek help from our community to keep it alive before ever going dark.

Your capsule is stored, sealed, until its opening date — our plans cover up to 30 years, and you can schedule beyond that for a small per-year add-on. We've built on durable, professional infrastructure (Cloudflare R2 and D1, encrypted at rest) and we take preservation seriously. But we won't insult you with unbackable permanence claims — no one can honestly promise that. What we can promise: on opening day you download everything in standard formats and keep your own copy, and if we ever wind down we'll release your capsule early. The most durable copy is the one in your hands, and we make sure you get it.

Your files are stored on Cloudflare R2 and your capsule's details on Cloudflare D1 — encrypted at rest, transferred over encrypted connections (TLS), and held on infrastructure distributed across the globe. Your capsule is sealed and immutable from the moment you lock it until its opening date: you can't reopen it early, and it isn't an inbox we browse. To be straight with you, capsules aren't end-to-end encrypted — someone with deep access to our infrastructure could technically reach stored content (today, that's one person). We don't read your capsules ourselves. The exception is safety: when you create a capsule, automated checks analyse its contents before it's sealed, looking for material that raises a safety, abuse, security, or legal concern. Some outcomes are handled automatically — a capsule can be blocked from delivery and an account restricted without anyone here having read it — and some are put in front of a human for a closer look. Those checks aren't perfect, so if you think one got it wrong, write to us and we'll look. Payments are handled by Stripe — we never see or store your card details.

No — and that's on purpose. A time capsule you can open anytime is just a folder, so once you seal it, it stays locked until the opening date. (The one exception: if we ever had to shut the service down, we'd unlock and deliver everything early so nothing is lost.) On the opening date it's all yours — read and download your photos, videos, and message in standard formats you can keep anywhere.

We keep your capsule sealed until its opening date. After it opens, it stays viewable online for a window you choose (up to a year), so recipients have time to read and download it — then it's permanently deleted from our systems. We're a vault and a messenger, not a permanent archive, and we're upfront about that. If you delete a personal capsule or your account, deleted data leaves our live systems immediately and our backups within 30 days. Event capsules survive account deletion and keep the retention period agreed for the event. The lasting copy is the one you download on opening day.

Three brothers — a CTO, a software engineer, and a math teacher. Two of us became fathers and wanted to send messages their daughters would open years later; the idea pulled all three of us in. Time Capsule is operated by Reen Tech LLC, a registered company in California. We run it carefully and personally — it's not a faceless platform. The full story is on our Preservation page.

You do — completely. Creating a capsule grants us a limited license to store and deliver it, and that's all. We don't sell your data, we don't use it for anything beyond running the service, and we don't read your sealed capsules. You can delete your account and personal capsules whenever you want. Event capsules, including anonymous guest submissions, and their delivery contacts are preserved for the recipients after account deletion. Those capsules keep their agreed expiration dates.