walkthrough & troubleshooting

Help

Everything you need to get set up, plus answers to the questions that come up most. Still stuck? Contact us — a real person reads every message.

Getting started

Choose your folder. The first time you open Death Dibs, tap "Choose folder" and pick a spot on your Google Drive, iCloud, or local storage. This is where your family's whole archive — items, people, plans — will live, so pick somewhere that's already syncing if you want it shared with family.
Set up the archive owner. Enter your own name and details — this identifies you as the person maintaining the archive.
Add family members. Use "Manage People" to add everyone who should be able to see the inventory or mark claims.
Catalog items. Walk around with your phone (or sit down at your computer) and add items one at a time — photo, description, and any sentimental notes.
Let people call dibs. Family members open the same synced file and mark which items they're interested in — everyone sees who's claimed what.
Add funeral & final wishes. Fill out the funeral plan and obituary sections whenever you're ready — they live right alongside the inventory. The obituary builder gets you a basic first draft; plan on spending a little more time with it afterward — reading a few real examples, or asking an AI chat assistant to help polish the language — before it's ready to send anywhere.
Export when you need to. Generate a PDF summary any time — handy for an estate attorney, insurance company, or just printing a copy for the family binder.

Getting a family member set up on their own device

Your purchase covers your whole family on one archive — there's no per-device or per-person fee, and family members don't need their own activation code. Here's how to bring someone else in:

Share the folder. Using your Drive or iCloud app (not Death Dibs), share the family folder you chose during setup with the person you want to add, the same way you'd share any folder.
They download the app. Death Dibs is free to download on iOS, Android, and desktop — send them the link to deathdibs.app.
They choose the shared folder. On first open, they tap "Choose folder" and pick the same folder you just shared with them (it'll show up once their Drive/iCloud has finished syncing it).
That's it. Since your activation lives inside the archive file itself, they'll automatically see the full unlocked app — no code to enter, nothing to buy.

PINs — what they do and how to reset one

The first time you tap your own name in the app, you'll be asked to set a short PIN (4–6 digits). From then on, tapping your name asks for that PIN again before you can mark dibs or make any change as you. It exists for one reason: to keep dibs honest — so nobody else in the family can tap your name and claim an item "as you" without your say-so. Nobody sets or sees anyone else's PIN, including the archive owner; everyone picks their own the first time they sign in.

Forgot a PIN? The archive owner can reset it: open "Manage People," find that person, and choose "Reset PIN." They'll simply be asked to set a brand-new one the next time they tap their name — PINs aren't recoverable. Nothing about a PIN is ever sent to or stored by Death Dibs; the only thing saved is a one-way hash, and it lives in the same archive file as everything else, in your own Drive, iCloud, or local folder. Even someone with access to that file can't read the PIN back out from the hash — a reset on your end is the only way back in.

Activating your purchase

The app works in a limited free mode until you activate it. Once you've purchased Death Dibs, open the app, tap "Activate," and enter the code from your confirmation email — it looks like DDB-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX. See our order confirmation page for the full rundown of what to expect after checkout.

Troubleshooting

I never got my activation code email

Check your spam/junk folder first — it comes from [email protected]. If it's genuinely not there, contact us with the email address you used at checkout and we'll resend it.

My activation code says it's invalid

Double-check for typos — codes use the format DDB-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX and don't include the letter O (to avoid confusion with zero). If it still won't activate, contact us with your order email and we'll look into it.

I'm reinstalling the app / got a new device

No problem — enter the same activation code again in the new install. Reactivating the same family archive is always free and unlimited, exactly for situations like a lost phone or a hard drive dying.

I want to start a completely new family archive

Your purchase covers a limited number of brand-new archives (as opposed to reinstalling onto the same one). If you hit that limit and have a genuine need for another — for example, after a serious data-loss event — contact us and we'll sort it out.

Where is my data actually stored?

In the folder you chose during setup — on your own Google Drive, iCloud, or local disk. Death Dibs has no company server and never receives a copy of your archive's contents. See our Privacy Policy for details.

How do I back up my data?

Since your archive is just a file in a folder, back it up however you already back up that cloud service (Drive's version history, iCloud, Time Machine, your usual backup routine, etc.) — Death Dibs doesn't need anything special from you beyond keeping that folder safe.

Two family members edited at the same time and something looks off

Death Dibs relies on your cloud provider's own sync to share the file — if two people edit at the exact same moment, you may see a sync conflict copy created by Drive or iCloud (this is normal behavior for any shared file, not specific to Death Dibs). If you run into this often, it usually helps to have one person do most of the data entry, with everyone else mainly viewing and marking dibs.