HeartTold v. EvaHeld: Read the Guide

01

What Each Product Is Designed For

EvaHeld is designed to be comprehensive. It holds a person's full legacy: their stories, their wishes, their legal and financial information, and messages they want to send to family members after they are gone. It is, in a meaningful sense, a single secure place where everything that matters about a person can be organised and preserved. For families who have been putting off both legacy planning and story capture — and most families are putting off both — EvaHeld makes a compelling case for doing them together.

HeartTold is designed to be deep, not comprehensive. It does one thing: captures stories. But it does this in a specific way that no other platform attempts. Rather than providing a vault and asking the loved one to fill it, HeartTold calls them directly and draws their stories out through guided conversation. The phone rings. They pick it up. The AI asks questions and listens, follows up, and probes deeper when a story is starting to emerge.

These are not competing philosophies. Families who need both estate planning and story capture may want both products. What this guide is designed to clarify is: if story capture is the primary goal, which product is most likely to produce the most stories from your specific loved one?

02

How Stories Are Actually Captured: Login vs Phone Call

EvaHeld's Charli AI provides thoughtful prompts that guide the storyteller through their memories. But the storyteller has to be there: logged in, in front of a browser, reading the prompt and choosing to respond. Charli guides the process; it does not initiate contact. The loved one must come to the vault.

This is the same activation problem that limits every self-directed legacy product. The vault is available. The prompts are thoughtful. The platform is well-designed. But it requires the loved one to log in, find the prompt, sit down, and contribute — regularly, over weeks and months. For some people, that happens. For many of the people whose stories most urgently need capturing, it does not.

HeartTold reverses the model. The platform calls your loved one. The phone rings — the same phone they have used their whole lives. A warm, guided conversation begins. They do not need to log in. They do not need to navigate anything. The only thing required of them is answering the phone.

For families where the loved one is an active browser user who will engage with a vault regularly, EvaHeld's model works. For families where the loved one would never sit down and log in but will always pick up the phone — which describes a significant proportion of the people in their seventies and eighties — HeartTold is more likely to produce stories.

03

The Estate Planning Question: Is EvaHeld Also a Will?

EvaHeld is not a will-writing service, but it stores one. Users can upload their existing will, and EvaHeld holds it in the encrypted vault alongside advance care directives, financial documents, and personal wishes. For Australian users, these documents are legally valid under Australian law. For users in the UK, USA, or other jurisdictions, the document storage is still useful, but the legal validity is jurisdiction-dependent.

EvaHeld also includes QR Emergency Access Cards — physical cards that first responders can scan to access a person's medical directives and emergency contacts. For aged care families or families managing a parent's care, this is a genuinely useful capability.

HeartTold has none of this. It does not store legal documents. It is not designed for estate planning. If the primary need is a comprehensive legacy vault that includes documents and wishes alongside stories, EvaHeld is the better choice.

If the primary need is to capture a lifetime of stories from a loved one who will not sit down and record them themselves, HeartTold is the more effective tool.

04

Depth vs Breadth: How Many Stories Does Each Product Actually Capture?

EvaHeld's story capture is user-directed. Charli prompts, but the volume and depth of what is captured depends entirely on how much the loved one chooses to add. A highly engaged user could build an extraordinary archive. A less engaged user might add a few text entries before the momentum fades.

HeartTold's story capture happens through a conversation the system initiates. The AI calls on a schedule, asks questions, and follows up when something interesting emerges. “You mentioned your father had a workshop in the back garden. What was he making?” The depth of what comes out is not dependent on the loved one's initiative — it is driven by the conversation itself.

There is also the question of dynamic follow-up. EvaHeld's prompts are fixed: a prompt is answered and the story is what the person chose to say. HeartTold's conversation is adaptive: every answer produces a question that goes deeper. The stories people have genuinely never told — the ones they have not thought of in decades — tend to come out in conversation, not in response to a prompt.

05

The Queryable Vault: Accessing What Was Captured

EvaHeld organises stories, documents, and files into Family Rooms with access control. Family members can be invited into specific rooms and browse the content held there. The vault is a secure shared space.

HeartTold's vault is searchable. “What did Nana say about the time she nearly missed the boat to England?” You type the question. HeartTold searches across all captured conversations and surfaces the relevant passages in her words. As conversations accumulate over months and years, the vault becomes a place the family returns to: not just to browse, but to ask.

For grandchildren who grow up after the loved one is gone, the difference between a browsable archive and a queryable one is significant. A browsable archive is a collection you read through. A queryable vault is something closer to a conversation.

06

Australia vs Global: EvaHeld's Market Focus

EvaHeld was built in Australia, for Australian families, with Australian law in mind. The advance care directives stored in EvaHeld are legally valid under Australian law. The servers are based in Australia. The pricing is in Australian dollars ($99 AUD per year, approximately $65 USD).

For Australian families, this is a genuine advantage: local data residency, local legal compliance, and a platform that understands the specific regulatory environment around advance care planning in Australia.

For families in the UK or USA, EvaHeld still works as a document vault and story capture platform, but the legal document features may not align with local requirements. Documents are stored, not drafted, so their legal validity is jurisdiction-dependent.

HeartTold is built for all three markets — Australia, UK, and USA — with USD pricing and features that do not depend on any particular legal framework.

07

EvaHeld vs HeartTold: Pricing Compared

EvaHeld has a free forever tier — text stories and up to five file uploads, with unlimited sharing and Family Rooms. That is a genuinely usable starting point. Paid plans are AUD $9 per month or AUD $99 per year (approximately USD $65). A lifetime plan is available at AUD $399. Invited family members get free vaults — the cost is borne by whoever sets up the primary account.

HeartTold is free to start — a first interview is included. The Pro plan is $84 USD per year ($9.99 per month), or $79 USD as a one-time gift for a full year. At comparable annual pricing, EvaHeld is cheaper in USD terms (approximately $65 vs $84). HeartTold's higher price reflects the cost of AI outbound phone calls, which are an ongoing infrastructure expense not present in a document vault model.

08

When to Choose EvaHeld and When to Choose HeartTold

Choose EvaHeld if your primary concern is comprehensive legacy management — if you want one secure place that holds your family's documents, wishes, and stories together, and if the loved one is willing to log in and contribute over time. If you are in Australia and want advance care directives that are legally valid locally, EvaHeld is particularly well-suited.

Choose HeartTold if story capture is the primary goal and if the loved one is the kind of person who will pick up the phone but would never log into a vault. If the concern is “we have never captured any of this and the window is closing,” HeartTold is designed for that urgency: it calls them, asks the questions, and builds the archive from the conversation rather than waiting for the loved one to show up.

For some families, the two products are complementary rather than competing. The stories HeartTold captures could sit alongside the legal and medical documents in EvaHeld. They solve different parts of the same underlying problem: the weight of everything we have not said and organised while there is still time.