Firsthand
The keepsake of a life, in their own voice.
One gentle question a week, answered out loud on their own phone. Firsthand listens like a great biographer — and a lifetime of answers becomes a living archive your whole family reads, hears, and keeps.
Free to try. No account, no app for Mom or Dad — ever.
The difference, shown
Everyone promises follow-up questions. Here is what listening looks like.
Here's what a week looks like
"What's a smell that takes you straight back to your childhood?"
Grandma Ruth answered
"Bread. My mother baked on Saturdays and the whole house went warm with it. We weren't allowed to touch a loaf until it cooled, so I'd stand by the window pretending not to wait. I can still feel that ache."
Then it asked, because it actually listened:
"Who taught you to wait by that window — and did you ever pass that patience on?"
A few weeks later, it had quietly written this
Saturdays in Ruth's house began with flour and ended with the smell of something rising. Her mother kept the kitchen, and Ruth kept the window — learning, loaf by cooling loaf, that the best things came to those who could stand still for them.
An illustrative exchange — the interviewer that writes your family’s second question is the one we test every week.
StoryWorth’s standard plan mails your mom the next question on its list. Firsthand writes the next question because of what she just said — the one a great biographer would ask. That second question is the whole product.
How it works
A ritual, not a chore.
You set the table
Pick the interviewer whose sensibility fits your family, add your mom or dad, and we text them that it's coming — a gift from you, never a call from a stranger.
They just talk
One question a week. A link that opens and listens. No app to learn, no password, no typing — they answer out loud, the way stories have always been told.
The family gathers around it
Chapters arrive written from her own words, carrying her own voice. Read them, listen to them, send the ones that stop you — and when a chapter reminds you of something, ask her about it in person. That conversation is the point.
Kept, not transcribed away
Her voice is the point.
Every answer is kept exactly as she told it — the laugh, the pause, the phrasing no one else in the world has. Chapters carry the actual recording alongside the words, so you can press play on her telling of it this year, and in fifty.
That promise is the name on the door: what your family keeps is a firsthand account. Every line of every chapter is traceable to her own words. Nothing is ever invented, and a correction is kept alongside the original — never written over it.
When you want something for the shelf, print the archive into a keepsake book whenever you like — a keepsake, not a requirement. The archive never depends on it.
Whose stories are they?
Yours. Actually yours.
A family archive is a trust. So the promises below aren’t marketing copy — they’re the same commitments, word for word, everywhere in the product, and we invite you to hold any memory service (including this one) to what its terms actually say.
Take everything with you, anytime — every story, every recording — or erase it all and leave nothing behind. No account is ever required of the person telling the stories.
Kept in their own voice
We keep the actual recording of every answer for as long as your archive exists, so you can hear your loved one tell it in their own voice.
You can download or permanently delete every recording at any time.
Read your rights in fullOne plan, no tricks
A year of being heard.
$100 / year
- A weekly interview that builds on every answer before it
- The living archive: chapters in her words, kept in her voice
- The whole family reads and listens — no accounts required
- Export everything, or erase everything, any time
The forever-free archive
If you ever stop renewing, everything already captured stays readable and audible — free, for good. Not renewing pauses new interviews. It never takes away what she already told you.
The first questions are free — before any account, before any payment.
There is always one more story. Firsthand asks the first question — the best ones, your family will ask at the table.
Begin with one question