Digital Estate Checklist for Executors: Handling a Loved One's Online Accounts and Subscriptions

By The HeirLoft Team · June 19, 2026

Being named executor used to mean tracking down bank accounts, property, and paperwork. Now there's a second estate layered on top of the first: email, subscriptions, photo libraries, social accounts, domains, crypto — a digital life that keeps running, and keeps billing, after someone is gone. It's newer, messier, and far less documented than the financial side, and most families have no map of it.

This is an organizing overview — a checklist of what to be aware of and gather, not a set of legal steps you're cleared to take. The goal is to help you see the whole picture and bring the right questions to the right people, because the digital side has its own rules, and they vary.

First: your authority comes from the law, not the login

The single most important thing to understand up front: as an executor, what you're permitted to do with a deceased person's digital accounts is governed by law and each provider's process — not by whether you happen to have their password.

• In the U.S., fiduciary access to digital assets is governed by the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), which has been adopted — with variations — by most states. What it lets an executor access, and how, depends on the jurisdiction and on what the deceased's will and any provider "legacy" settings say. The Uniform Law Commission maintains the official overview of the Act.
• Because it varies by state and situation, this is a question for a probate or estate attorney handling the estate — not something to resolve from a checklist.
• Use lawful channels only: the custodian's (provider's) official process for a deceased user, the authority granted through the will and probate, and your attorney's guidance. Logging in as the deceased, sharing their credentials, or working around a service's Terms of Service can violate both the provider's rules and the law — even with good intentions. When a provider has a deceased-user process, that's the door to use.

The digital estate checklist

Work through these as categories to organize, gathering what exists and routing each to its proper, lawful process. Each is a sub-topic in its own right; this hub is the map.

1. Find what exists. You can't administer accounts you don't know about. Statements, the email inbox, and app stores surface the bulk of them — see how to find a deceased person's subscriptions and recurring charges.
2. The email account is the hub. A primary inbox resets and receives notices for almost everything else, which makes it central — and sensitive. Access it only through lawful channels (the provider's deceased-user process and your attorney's guidance), not by guessing a password — see how to access a deceased person's email account, the lawful way.
3. Recurring subscriptions and charges. These keep billing until stopped, and each has its own cancellation or bereavement process — see how to cancel a deceased person's subscriptions, platform by platform.
4. Financial and payment accounts. Banks, brokerages, PayPal/Venmo and the like run through the formal estate process; coordinate these with the attorney and the institutions, not ad hoc.
5. Photos, social, and memorialization. Many platforms have their own memorialization or closure processes and "legacy contact" settings; these decide what can be preserved or closed and by whom — see how to close or memorialize a deceased person's social media accounts.
6. Domains and crypto. Easy to miss and hard to recover without specifics — registrars and renewal dates for domains, and where wallets or exchange accounts live for crypto. Note that these can hold real value and have their own access rules.
7. Keep a running record. Document what you found, what you closed or transferred, and when. An organized record protects you and makes the accounting cleaner.

Where to start: see what was actually being paid for

Of all of it, the recurring side is both the most time-sensitive (it keeps charging) and the easiest to surface in one pass — because the receipts and renewals are sitting in the inbox. Rather than reconstruct it from a year of statements, an executor can let it surface from the email itself.

That's what HeirLoft's Subscription Autopsy does: it reads the recurring charges out of the email automatically, with an estimated annual total, so step one — knowing what existed — doesn't take weeks.

Start by surfacing the recurring charges

To be clear: this is about seeing and organizing what existed so you can route each item to its proper process — not a recommendation to take any particular action with any particular account, and not a substitute for legal advice. What you're permitted to access or close, and in what order, is a question for the attorney handling the estate.

If you're planning ahead — spare your own executor this

If you're reading this not as an executor but as someone who'd rather their own family never face the scramble, the flip side of this checklist is short: leave them the map you wish you had. See how to leave an organized list of your accounts for your family, and — since forgotten subscriptions are the hardest part to reconstruct — the subscriptions you forgot you're paying for. The same scan that helps an executor see what existed can keep your own list current while you're here.

See what you're really paying for

Nothing here is legal or financial advice. Fiduciary access to digital assets varies by state and situation — for your specific case, consult the probate or estate attorney handling the estate.