How to protect your Vercel account while you are alive
There is no way to name a beneficiary or successor on a Vercel account. While the account holder is alive, Vercel allows authorized users and transferring the account.
Vercel decides requests about a Vercel account after a death case by case, so nothing in its terms promises a survivor anything; what the account holder sets up in advance is what holds. There is no way to name a beneficiary or successor on a Vercel account. While the account holder is alive, Vercel allows authorized users and transferring the account.
How to protect your Vercel accounts
- •Keep them on a team with more than one Owner, where any Owner can move them to another team.
- •Or move them to another registrar with the authorization code from the Domains page, which only a team Owner sees.
Naming who acts after a death
- Designation
Vercel offers no way to name a beneficiary or successor for an account. Continuity on a team comes from having more than one Owner, which Vercel recommends.1
What Vercel Inc.'s terms say about sharing and transfers4
- Workspace roles and admin access
Vercel teams have the team roles Owner, Member, Developer, Security, Billing, Pro Viewer, Enterprise Viewer and Contributor, and the project roles Project Administrator, Project Developer and Project Viewer.2
The Billing role manages the team's billing information and payment methods and has read-only access to every project. Pro teams allow one Billing member; Enterprise teams allow several.2
Vercel's documentation states: "Teams can have more than one owner. For continuity, we recommend that at least two individuals have owner permissions."1
- Transferring the account or registration
The Terms bar a user from assigning or transferring the agreement without Vercel's prior written consent.3
Team ownership moves in two parts: an Owner promotes another member to Owner, then the new Owner demotes or removes the original one. Vercel blocks removing the last remaining Owner.1
A team on a Pro trial is capped at one Owner, and Vercel allows no Owner changes during the trial; the team upgrades to paid Pro first.1
A project moves between teams by the owner of the team it leaves, including from a Hobby team to a Pro team. Its domains, aliases and environment variables move with it, except variables set in vercel.json.4
A domain moves to another Vercel team from the Domains page, or to another registrar with an authorization code that, on a team, only Owners see. A registrar transfer can take up to a week.5
ICANN transfer restrictions can block a registrar transfer, including a 60-day lock after registration, a previous transfer or a change to the registrant details.5
- Exporting and backing up data
The `vercel env pull` command downloads a project's Development environment variables into a local .env file.6
- Expiry and activity requirements
Unless a custom policy is set, Pro and Enterprise teams keep canceled deployments 30 days, errored 90 days, pre-production 180 days and production 1 year before they become eligible for automatic deletion.7
Sources7
Should you save your passwords for your family?
Some people store account passwords so a family member can sign in later. The practice has three practical limits:
- Two-factor authentication often blocks it. Most accounts require a second factor — a code sent to a phone, an authenticator app, a passkey, or a physical key. A saved password alone frequently does not grant access, and the recovery codes that would are easy to lose or let go stale.
- It usually conflicts with the platform's terms. Most operators prohibit account sharing and signing in as another person, including after a death. Stored credentials are not the operator's recognized access path, and using them can violate the terms of service.
- Operators provide other paths. Where an operator offers a designation tool — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, a beneficiary designation — that mechanism grants access the operator recognizes. A password manager's own emergency-access or legacy feature passes credentials through a controlled process. Digital assets named in a will or trust give a fiduciary authority under each state's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
Sources
Data sourced from Vercel Inc. primary sources (12 pages reviewed). How we research.
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