Microsoft counts two years without a sign-in, and Dropbox counts 12 months on a free account. Amazon runs no such clock on its accounts at all.
An Amazon account stays open after a death, and the subscriptions attached to it keep charging the card. Nobody at these companies watches death records. These four belong on one page because your household probably holds accounts with several of them. Their storage rules differ, their deletion clocks differ, and what each one publishes about a death differs too.
Amazon sits in the group of services that persist until somebody reports the death, alongside Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Reddit. Microsoft and Dropbox belong with the services that run a timer instead. The difference decides which job is urgent and which can wait.
One rule covers all four of them, and it’s the same rule you’ll meet at every other service. Copy the files out before cancelling anything. Start with saving the photos and files, because a cancelled storage plan can push an account over its quota.
Two gaps sit in this page from the very start. Microsoft’s consumer email wasn’t checked for this site, so nothing here describes how an Outlook or Hotmail inbox is handled.
This site checked the inactivity rules below, and it didn’t check for a deceased-user process at either company. Where the page is silent, the silence describes the research rather than the company. Treat that silence as a gap in the research. A phone call to the company is the way to fill it, and the answer may differ from the published policy.
Amazon stops the charges before the paperwork is done
Amazon runs a bereavement channel for families. The channel can stop subscriptions before the estate has all its papers together, and that’s unusual among large platforms.
Amazon’s published list runs to four items. It asks for a death certificate, proof of estate authorisation, photo identification, and the account email address or phone number. The charges don’t pause while you assemble those four items and send them in to Amazon. A phone call to the bereavement line can pause them sooner.
Until somebody reports the death, the account behaves as though nothing has happened at all. The account stays live, and its subscriptions keep billing on their usual dates. No vendor monitors death records, so charges continue until somebody cancels them or the payment method fails.
Cancelling a subscription isn’t always a single click. The Eighth Circuit vacated the Federal Trade Commission’s click-to-cancel rule on July 8, 2025, on procedural grounds. As of July 28, 2026, no uniform federal one-click cancellation right had replaced it.
Cancelling a subscription and closing an account aren’t the same job. The wider sequence for the money side sits on stopping the payments, and it covers the order to work in.
Bereavement phone lines remain the route that works when a web form stalls or goes in circles. Ask what the call can stop today, and what it can stop once the documents arrive. Write down the name of whoever answers. A second representative may have no record of the earlier call, so keep your own.
What Amazon releases, and to whom, is a decision Amazon makes case by case. Where the estate’s authority is in question, the lawyer handling it is the person to ask, rather than a customer service line. Amazon’s bereavement page lists the documents it wants.
Amazon invites a sign-in, and that sets it apart
Amazon’s bereavement page does something the other services here don’t. It invites a survivor who holds the account email address or phone number to sign in, or to reset the password.
Compare that invitation with what the other companies say. Google states that it cannot provide passwords or other login details to a family. Apple hands over a separate legacy account rather than the original one. X says it cannot provide account access to anyone, whatever their relationship to the person who died.
The invitation matters because the general pattern runs the other way. None of them releases a password. Across the platforms this site examined, access means a limited role, a copy of the data, or a parallel account. Amazon and Snapchat are the documented exceptions, and both assume or invite the use of a password.
Signing in with those details still carries a legal question. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the federal computer-crime law, sits underneath it, and a support page doesn’t settle it.
The Ninth Circuit’s 2016 Nosal decision placed authorisation under that act with the system owner, not the account holder. Nosal arose out of an employment dispute. No reported decision applies it to an executor, and this site’s research located no prosecution of a survivor who signed in. The exposure is doctrinal rather than observed.
Whether Amazon’s invitation changes any of that is a question for the lawyer handling the estate. The fuller account sits on logging in with their password. Read it before anybody types a password into the account.
A Kindle library ends with the reader who bought it
A Kindle library is licensed, not sold. Amazon’s terms carry no assignment to a third party, so the library ends with the account holder as a matter of contract.
Families are often surprised by this one. A shelf of paper books passes to whoever the will names. A shelf of Kindle books is a set of licences attached to one account, and licences carry their own terms. The money spent was real, and the contract still governs what happens next.
Apple works the same way on purchased media. Its legacy account excludes purchased media and the iCloud Keychain, so films, music, and saved passwords stay outside what a legacy contact receives. The pattern repeats widely enough to plan around it.
Other companies write the same clause. X’s terms make an account a personal licence that cannot be assigned, and TikTok’s bar access-sharing and transfer. Meta’s terms bar sharing a password or transferring an account too.
The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, or RUFADAA, sets a three-step order for these questions. A direction in a platform’s own tool comes first, a will or trust second, and terms of service where neither exists.
Nothing in that three-step order creates a way to move a licence that the terms hold in place. Whether an estate has any claim on the value of a digital library is a question for the lawyer handling it. This site can report what the terms say. Nobody here can say what a court would make of them.
Microsoft and Dropbox delete on a timer
Microsoft’s account activity policy sets the inactivity clock at two years. A second Microsoft rule covers storage rather than sign-ins.
Microsoft deletes OneDrive content once an account has sat over its storage quota for more than 12 months. That figure comes from a support resolution moderated by Microsoft rather than from the policy page. The policy page commits to no notice period. Google sends warning emails for months before it removes anything, and Microsoft says nothing of the kind.
Microsoft’s recovery window for deleted files wasn’t checked for this site. Treat the two-year clock as the number to plan around, and treat the quota rule as the one that arrives sooner. Both run without anybody at Microsoft knowing the account holder has died.
Dropbox draws its line at the price. Its notice about inactive accounts covers Basic accounts and exempts the paid ones.
Dropbox sends several reminder emails before it acts. It deletes the files within 90 days of that final notice. Those reminders land in the mailbox of the person who died, which is where every one of these warnings goes. If you aren’t reading that mailbox, you see nothing.
Four large storage providers each publish a time limit. Google allows two years, Apple’s iCloud terms set one year, Microsoft allows two years, and Dropbox gives a free account 12 months. Take the shortest one in the household as the working deadline.
The trap in all of this is one estates set for themselves. Cancelling a storage subscription pushes the account over its quota, and the deletion rules that follow are harsher than the ordinary ones. Keep paying until the copying is finished.
Put the payment dates for these accounts in a calendar beside that deadline. Then start the export, because a month of subscription fees costs less than a library nobody can rebuild.