Introducing Milkweed Foundation

We built One Final Message to deliver someone’s final wishes after they’ve passed. But over the past year, as detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants in the United States have surged, we kept asking ourselves a harder question: what if the same technology could send a message on with instructions to act once someone is taken?

That question became The Beacon. And today, we’re giving it a home of its own: Milkweed Foundation.

Why this matters now

Since we started One Final Message, we’ve watched the detainment and deportation of undocumented immigrants rise sharply. The erosion of their most basic rights — even a single phone call — is shocking. Most of us know someone under threat. Many of us know someone who was taken and only found out after the fact. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt at a loss: protests and letters to our representatives, doesn’t feel like enough.

We asked what we could do with the set of skills we have.

What The Beacon does

The Beacon is simple by design: a short message, sent automatically if you go silent. If you don’t check in every day, we deliver a message of up to 1,000 characters to the person you choose — a loved one, a business partner, an employer, an immigration attorney. It’s the digital equivalent of “if you don’t hear from me, here’s what you need to know and who to call.”

We built it differently from One Final Message on purpose. Where our original product holds a secure cache of important documents, The Beacon holds almost nothing — just your words to your contact.

Why a separate site?

Security is the cornerstone of everything we build, but the two products serve people with very different fears. Trying to reassure both on one site left our security page muddled and unfocused.

A Beacon user isn’t uploading financial records or sensitive documents. They don’t need to wade through explanations about encryption at rest and in transit, or promises that we never see their files. They need to know one thing above all: this information is never shared with ICE. That’s why The Beacon requires no sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) at all.

Sign-up was the second problem. One Final Message is built for careful, deliberate estate planning. The Beacon needs to be something you can set up in minutes, on your phone, when time and trust are short. All it asks for is a phone number for your alerts, and a phone number or email for your recipient. It’s free for the first 30 days, so there’s no credit card to enter.

And there was a third reason — one that’s more about us than the product. One Final Message is a business, and we’re proud of it: we make a living by securely holding and delivering documents and assets when someone dies. But we felt deeply uncomfortable drawing a profit from giving marginalized people a basic protection they should already have. Keeping the two under one roof never sat right.

The solution was obvious. We needed two separate sites.

Why “Milkweed”

We named the foundation after the plant that nourishes the monarch butterfly — a creature whose survival depends on migration, and a symbol of it. Milkweed is what makes that journey possible. We’d like to be a small part of what makes other journeys a little safer, using the skills we have.

What’s next

We’ve made Milkweed deliberately simple, stripping out every point of friction so you can sign up fast. There will never be ads on this site. Maintaining it and sending daily check-in texts does cost money, so for now we still charge a small fee to keep it running — but that’s not where we want to end up.

We’re actively looking to partner with immigration-rights organizations to advise us on any ways to make the site more welcoming and useful, and to make it available to their clients.  Our goal is to make The Beacon either free or at least set up so that we don’t require credit cards ever. We don’t know if this will be through partnerships, a donate button on our site, or some other method. If your organization wants to talk, we’d love to hear from you.