What is Aeterna?
Aeterna is a digital legacy service from Via Aeterna Ltd., founded in 2024. Each week it sends a prompt such as "What's your earliest childhood memory?" and you answer with a 5 to 10 minute voice note, or by typing; an AI interviewer called Johnny asks follow-up questions. Recordings are transcribed, tagged by theme and mood, and filed in a searchable archive alongside photos, letters and videos you upload.
Family members you invite, called beneficiaries, can ask the archive questions in plain language and hear the answers. The company says it can clone your voice from 3 to 5 minutes of audio using ElevenLabs, and a Digital Twin lets relatives talk with an AI version of you built from your recordings. Old photos can be animated with RunwayML and Kling AI, and uploaded photos go through face recognition to tag people.
Adult children can set the service up as a gift, and parents can record through one-tap links without an account. A $1,499 Time Capsule box keeps the archive and an offline Digital Twin on a device that plugs into a TV, for families worried about the company outlasting them.
How much does Aeterna cost?
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free Forever | $0 | 5 AI conversations, 1 animated memory, 1 family member |
| The Storyteller | $49/month | 30 conversations a month, 50 animated memories, 2 beneficiaries, voice cloning |
| The Family Legacy | $159/month | 100 sessions, 100 animated portraits, 5 beneficiaries |
| Memory Booster Pack | $29 one-time | +10 sessions and +10 file uploads |
| Time Capsule | $1,499 one-time | Offline device with the archive and Digital Twin |
Free Forever $0 (5 AI conversations, 1 animated memory, 1 family member). The Storyteller $49/month (30 conversations a month, 50 animated memories, 2 beneficiaries, voice cloning, Digital Twin). The Family Legacy $159/month (100 sessions, 100 animated portraits, 5 beneficiaries). Memory Booster Pack $29 one-time (+10 sessions). Time Capsule offline device $1,499 one-time. No yearly prices shown; the company's own llms.txt file lists the paid plans at $9.99 and $19.90.
Is Aeterna worth it?
Most families mean to record Grandma telling the story of how she met Grandpa, and most never do. The phone stays in the pocket, and then one day the voice is gone.
Aeterna turns that into a weekly habit. A prompt arrives, your parent talks for five or ten minutes, and the recording is transcribed and filed by theme. Later, a grandchild can ask "what was your first job?" and hear the answer. Gift Setup lets you prepare the account for a parent, and one-tap links let them record without remembering a password. That is the part of the product most likely to get a first story saved.
The security commitments are stronger than many consumer apps make. Data is encrypted with AES-256 on Amazon's servers in Virginia, staff need written consent to open an archive, deleting an account wipes recordings and the voice model within 30 days, and the company promises 12 months' notice and a full export before any shutdown. It says recordings are not used to train AI models used for other users.
The catch: the hard questions are the ones this product exists to answer, and they are not covered. Nothing published says how Aeterna checks that the voice being cloned belongs to the account holder, or that they agreed; with gift accounts and recording links that need no login, that matters. Nor does it say who controls the archive once the narrator dies; stories can be sealed until something called "Legacy Pulse" activates, but how it works is not explained. The pages also contradict themselves: the Charter says the Digital Twin only uses what you recorded, while the voice-cloning section says the archive can speak "even for content the narrator never explicitly recorded". And the price is unclear: the pricing page says $49 and $159 a month, the company's own file for AI crawlers says $9.99 and $19.90.
Our take: plain recordings, which the free plan already keeps, are what a family will treasure; the cloned voice saying things your mother never said is the part to think hard about before paying for it.
Where it earns its place
An adult daughter whose 78-year-old father lives in another city
Get his stories recorded before it is too late
Set up a gift account with three prompts and send one-tap recording links. The free plan allows 5 AI conversations; regular weekly sessions need The Storyteller at $49 a month, $588 a year.
A grandmother recording stories for five grandchildren
Let each grandchild ask her questions years from now
The Family Legacy at $159 a month gives 5 beneficiary seats. Write down who should control the account after her death, since Aeterna does not publish how that handover works.
A family historian wary of a start-up closing
Keep the archive usable for decades without depending on one company
Use the free Download My Archive export regularly, or buy the $1,499 Time Capsule for an offline copy. Exports cover recordings, transcripts, photos and videos in standard formats.
Before you commit
- Setup
- Sign up on the web, Android or iOS (still in TestFlight in September 2026), answer the first prompt by voice or text, and invite beneficiaries with an invitation link that expires; access can be revoked at any time.
- Integrations
- ElevenLabs for voice cloning, RunwayML and Kling AI for animated photos, and AWS for hosting; no public API is documented.
- Data and privacy
- AES-256 at rest, TLS in transit, keys in AWS KMS, hosted in us-east-1. Recordings are not used to train AI models used for other users; account deletion removes all data, including voice models, within 30 days. No published consent check for voice cloning and no published process for access after death. Which AI tools train on your data?
- Cost at scale
- Weekly recording for a year on The Storyteller is $588; five family seats on The Family Legacy is $1,908 a year, more than the one-time Time Capsule.
- Limits
- The privacy, terms and security pages load only in a browser with JavaScript; the details here come from the company's llms-full.txt file, dated May 2026, which lists different prices from the live pricing page.
What’s good
- Weekly prompts and follow-up questions get stories recorded
- Parents can record by one-tap link without an account
- Deletion within 30 days, voice model included
- 12 months' notice and full export promised before any shutdown
- Offline $1,499 Time Capsule if the company disappears
What’s not
- No published consent check before cloning a voice
- No published process for access after the narrator dies
- Voice clone can speak words the narrator never recorded
- Pricing pages disagree: $49 and $159 versus $9.99 and $19.90
- Face recognition runs on uploaded family photos
Best for
Families who want a parent's or grandparent's stories recorded in their own voice and are comfortable deciding the access rules themselves.
Aeterna alternatives
Aeterna: common questions
- Is Aeterna worth it?
- Aeterna makes recording a parent's stories easy and its privacy promises are solid, but at $49 a month it clones a voice without a published consent check and does not say who takes control when the narrator dies. We rate it 3.2 out of 5.
- How much does Aeterna cost?
- Free Forever $0 (5 AI conversations, 1 animated memory, 1 family member). The Storyteller $49/month (30 conversations a month, 50 animated memories, 2 beneficiaries, voice cloning, Digital Twin). The Family Legacy $159/month (100 sessions, 100 animated portraits, 5 beneficiaries). Memory Booster Pack $29 one-time (+10 sessions). Time Capsule offline device $1,499 one-time. No yearly prices shown; the company's own llms.txt file lists the paid plans at $9.99 and $19.90.
- What are the downsides of Aeterna?
- No published consent check before cloning a voice; no published process for access after the narrator dies; voice clone can speak words the narrator never recorded; pricing pages disagree: $49 and $159 versus $9.99 and $19.90; face recognition runs on uploaded family photos.
- Who is Aeterna best for?
- Families who want a parent's or grandparent's stories recorded in their own voice and are comfortable deciding the access rules themselves.
- How much does Aeterna cost for a team or in production?
- Weekly recording for a year on The Storyteller is $588; five family seats on The Family Legacy is $1,908 a year, more than the one-time Time Capsule.
- Is Aeterna safe for company data?
- AES-256 at rest, TLS in transit, keys in AWS KMS, hosted in us-east-1. Recordings are not used to train AI models used for other users; account deletion removes all data, including voice models, within 30 days. No published consent check for voice cloning and no published process for access after death.
- What are the best Aeterna alternatives?
- The closest alternatives we have reviewed are ElevenLabs.
Answers checked Nov 11, 2026.