Your stories are not our product
We sell a biography, for $500 — and in time, other things a family can make from the same recordings: a film, a documentary, their voice reading a story to a grandchild who never met them. Recordings may also be licensed to other companies, and your family may license their own. We ask the storyteller first, in plain words, before the first recording is made. If they say no, everything else works exactly the same and nobody is charged differently — and we never let anyone use a voice to impersonate the person it belongs to. We don't run ads, and nothing here is ever public.
We don't train AI on your family's stories
The AI that conducts interviews is used the way you'd use a tool — it reads an answer, it asks a good next question. Your recordings are not used to train models.
If we build something new, we ask first
We're exploring ways to bring a life story to life beyond the page — including films made from a person's own recordings and photographs, for their own family. Anything like that is opt-in and offered only to you: we'd describe it plainly, ask, and take no for an answer. It never becomes a reason to share your family's material with anyone else.
Losing recordings is the failure we plan against
Every recording is written down permanently the moment it's captured, then copied to separate off-site storage within seconds. A backup failure can never interrupt an interview, and the copies are checked continuously. This is deliberately over-engineered for a small company, because the thing we're protecting can't be re-recorded once someone is gone.
The storyteller is always in control
- They're told they're being recorded, in plain words, before the first question.
- Any question can be skipped, out loud, without explanation.
- They can stop a session at any moment, and nothing is lost.
- Nothing is ever published. There's no feed, no sharing, no audience beyond the family.
You can take everything with you
Every recording, transcript, and photo can be downloaded — all of it, in ordinary files, whenever you ask. We'd rather earn the right to hold your archive than trap you with it.
And you can have it all erased
Ask us to delete a storyteller and it's gone: the recordings, the transcripts, the photos, including the off-site backup copies. "Deleted except in our backups" isn't deletion, and we don't do it that way.
Who can hear it
Only the people you invite to the family circle. Access can be granted and removed by you at any time.
Where it lives
Encrypted in transit, stored on servers in the United States, with off-site backups. Passwords are hashed and unreadable, even to us.
Questions about any of this go straight to a human: support@familybiographer.com.