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Trust & Will digitized wills, trusts, and guardianship designations in a $180 billion market unchanged since the 1980s – raising $48M total while doubling revenue year over year.
ENTRY ANGLES
User-friendly digital estate planning product without blockchain or new legislation · International expansion into markets with compatible legal frameworks · Acquiring digital-first users before they adopt legacy provider habits
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Product design for complex regulatory compliance, Local regulatory expertise across multiple jurisdictions, Customer acquisition targeting digital-first demographic
The $180 billion US market for estate planning had barely changed in decades – then a generation raised on mobile banking started accumulating assets and realized the options available to them looked nothing like the rest of their financial lives. Trust & Will is the platform that stepped into that gap.
The service covers three core instruments: trusts (which transfer assets to beneficiaries outside of probate), wills, and guardianship designations for minor children. All three result in actual legal documents – printed, signed, and notarized – that clients arrange themselves. The trust setup costs $399 for an individual or $499 for a couple; a basic will runs $89 or $159. Updates in the first year require paying for document reprints; from year two, a $12 annual subscription covers ongoing amendments.
The estate planning industry before Trust & Will looked a great deal like retail banking before the first wave of digital challengers arrived: branch offices treated as a prerequisite for trust, paper forms, in-person appointments, and service models that had not fundamentally changed since the 1980s.
What changed was generational. A cohort that had grown up managing every financial relationship through their phones reached the age at which estate planning actually becomes relevant. They had assets. They had families. And they had no interest in scheduling an office appointment with an estate attorney. Their threshold for institutional trust was not a physical branch on a familiar street corner – it was whether the entire process could be handled from wherever they happened to be.
The cohort is large and the need is universal: virtually everyone with something to pass on eventually needs these instruments. Trust & Will captured the demand early. By December 2019 – eleven months after processing its first electronic estate plan – the platform had 60,000 users representing $15 billion in assets under guidance.
The timing also carries a competitive moat argument: the platform that acquires and educates these users first builds brand recognition and data advantages that are difficult for later entrants to overcome, even if the underlying legal product is commoditizable.
Trust & Will demonstrates that building a digital estate planning service does not require new legislation or blockchain infrastructure. A clean, user-friendly product that handles the complexity and hands off to a notary for execution is sufficient – and sufficient is often enough to start building market share.
The more interesting long-term opportunity is international. Estate planning digitization is at different stages in different markets. In some countries the legal framework is already compatible with a Trust & Will-style approach; in others, the regulatory environment requires local adaptation. That gap between regulatory readiness and product availability is where a well-capitalized entrant could establish early dominance in multiple markets simultaneously.
The playbook is clear: acquire the next generation of asset owners before they form habits around legacy providers. Digital-first users do not revert to paper.