Why I Built myAngelVault
It started with love, a growing family, and a question I couldn't stop thinking about.
I never set out to build a company.
I just wanted to make sure my children would one day receive everything I was saving for them.
But to explain how myAngelVault came to life, I have to start a little further back. Long before there was a product, a website, or even an idea.
I have to start with Kriszti.
It started with a love story
For a long time, I thought I understood what falling in love meant. Something intense and wonderful, perhaps, but something that eventually fades beneath the weight of everyday life.
Then, completely unexpectedly, on an ordinary, gray weekday morning, I met Kriszti.
I still remember the first moment I saw her. My knees almost gave way. It felt like being struck by lightning.
I fell in love with her instantly, completely, and hopelessly.
It took me six months to finally get that first date and our first kiss. Six months that felt considerably longer at the time.
But it was worth every single day.
What followed was an intense, beautiful relationship. And quite early on, we both felt that this was something different. We weren't just spending time together. We were building a life.
We had dreams. Plans. A future we could almost see taking shape.
Kriszti finished her degree and began her career. During a trip to Prague, I asked her to marry me. We got married, created a home together, and eventually began the greatest adventure of our lives.
Becoming parents.
When our story became theirs
When we learned that Kriszti was expecting our first son, Zéti, an exciting thought came to me: this was my chance to give our children something I had always wished I had from my own childhood.
I started thinking about how little of my childhood I could actually revisit.
Like many families, we had a small collection of old photographs. Some were faded, some were bent, and many had no dates or descriptions. Sometimes we weren't even sure who was in them.
I realized that most of my childhood lived in fragments. A few pictures, a handful of memories, and feelings I couldn't quite put into words.
I wanted something different for our children.
I wanted Zéti — and later his little brother, Levi — to be able to look back and understand not only what their childhood looked like, but what our lives were like while they were growing up.
The ordinary days. The events that shaped our lives. The little details that seem unimportant until they're only memories.
So I started documenting everything.
Not just birthdays and holidays.
I filmed how we transformed our cluttered spare room into a nursery before Zéti was born. Kriszti's growing belly. The early morning drive to the hospital on the day he arrived. The moment we brought him home.
And later, our everyday life during the COVID lockdowns — the three of us learning to live in a world that suddenly felt very different.
His first steps. His laughter. The little moments that would never happen in quite the same way again.
Then Levi arrived, and our story became even richer.
Our family was growing, and so was our collection of memories.
I thought I had everything protected
Over the years, I organized our photos and videos carefully.
The collection kept growing, and its value to me grew with it.
Eventually, I began worrying about losing it.
What if a hard drive failed? What if there was a fire or a break-in? What if years of memories simply disappeared because I hadn't protected them properly?
So I did what seemed logical.
I built a reliable backup system, with copies protected against different kinds of accidents and failures.
Problem solved.
Or so I thought.
Because sometime later, a completely different question entered my mind.
What if nothing happened to the files — but something happened to me?
The memories could be perfectly safe, backed up in multiple places, and still never reach the people I had collected them for.
What if my sons didn't know where to look — or didn't even know the collection existed?
What if they never realized how much was there, or why I had spent so many years collecting and carefully organizing it all?
I had protected the memories from being lost.
But I hadn't found a way to make sure they would be passed on.
And suddenly, that felt like a much bigger problem.
A problem I couldn't stop trying to solve
I didn't immediately think about creating an app or starting a business.
I simply started asking myself how I could solve this problem.
How could something so personal be delivered to the right people if something unexpected happened to me, and I was no longer here to pass it on myself?
After all, life doesn't always go according to plan.
How could the system know when to act?
And perhaps most importantly, how could it avoid acting when it shouldn't?
I spent weeks, then months, thinking about these questions.
I explored possibilities, worked through different scenarios, and began sketching interface designs and flowcharts. Gradually, I started designing a process that could check whether someone was still there before taking any irreversible action.
A missed notification couldn't be enough. A broken phone couldn't be enough. Being offline for a few days during a well-deserved vacation certainly couldn't be enough.
This needed to be handled with extraordinary care.
Eventually, the pieces started coming together.
My sketches became more detailed, the processes became clearer, and what had initially seemed almost impossible to solve began turning into something I could actually build.
Little by little, it began to take shape.
And somewhere along the way, I realized something else.
Maybe this wasn't just my problem.
There were probably other people — parents, partners, friends — who had something meaningful they wanted to leave behind, but no reliable way to make sure it would reach the people they loved.
That was when I decided this shouldn't remain a makeshift solution for my own family.
If I was going to do this, I was going to do it properly.
More than a place to store memories
As the idea developed, another question appeared.
Even if I could safely pass on everything I had already collected, our story wasn't going to stop there.
I still wanted to document our lives for many years to come. I hoped to have another ten, twenty, or many more years of everyday moments to capture.
I didn't want to prepare everything once and then leave it untouched.
I wanted something that could grow with our lives.
Something simple enough to add to whenever a new memory was made, a new thought came to mind, or there was something important I wanted my children to know.
And that's when the idea expanded beyond photos and videos.
Because what if I wanted to tell Zéti and Levi something in my own words?
What if there was something I wanted Kriszti to hear in my own voice?
A story I never got around to telling. A thank-you. An apology. A piece of advice. Or simply a reminder of how much they were loved.
Sometimes a photograph is enough.
Sometimes only your own voice will do.
So the idea grew to include personal letters, voice recordings, video messages, photographs, and important documents — organized into private vaults for the people who matter most.
But the central purpose never changed.
myAngelVault isn't simply about keeping memories safe. It's about helping the things we leave behind reach the people they were meant for.
And only when we're no longer here to deliver them ourselves.
My hope, of course, is that I'll be the one to give my children these memories someday, at exactly the right moment. But if life takes an unexpected turn, there's something deeply reassuring about knowing they won't simply remain hidden away, undiscovered and unread.
Building something I truly believe in
I'm not going to pretend that building myAngelVault was easy.
There were countless technical challenges, difficult decisions, and problems that took much longer to solve than I expected.
Secure, encrypted storage. Reliable safety checks. Payments and subscriptions. Building a brand from the ground up. Making everything work across a website and mobile apps.
And then there was Apple — an especially challenging and unavoidable part of the journey.
Let's just say it taught me entirely new forms of patience, adaptability, and persistence.
But somewhere in the middle of all those challenges, something wonderful happened.
I suddenly understood what people really mean when they say: “Enjoy the ride.”
Watching a deeply personal idea gradually become a real, working service was an incredible feeling.
Every solved problem brought it a little closer to what I had imagined.
And every new feature reminded me why I had started in the first place.
Today, myAngelVault has become a service where people can create private vaults for their loved ones, add to them as life goes on, and rely on a carefully designed, multi-step safety process before any messages are released.
It uses repeated check-ins, trusted-person confirmation, and additional safeguards intended to prevent an accidental delivery.
Because this isn't the kind of service where “probably” is good enough.
The responsibility is simply too important.
From our family to yours
When I look back at how all of this began, I sometimes find it hard to believe how far we've come.
From the moment I fell in love with Kriszti, to building a home together, to raising our two wonderful boys and sharing the adventure of watching them grow.
From recording the transformation of a cluttered spare room into a nursery to creating a service designed to help families pass on some of the most meaningful things they'll ever leave behind.
I never imagined those moments would lead me here.
And I'm incredibly glad they did.
myAngelVault began with a very personal wish: to make sure my sons would receive the memories and messages I had always intended for them, no matter what life might bring.
Today, I hope it can give other families that same opportunity.
I often think of it as a different kind of life insurance.
Not something that leaves money behind, but something that helps leave behind words, memories, reassurance, and a little piece of ourselves.
Of course, no service can replace a person we love.
But it can help make sure that some of the things we would have wanted to say don't disappear with us.
If our story means something to you, we'd genuinely love for you to become part of it.
Creating your own vault is a way to take care of something important for the people you love.
And on a personal level, every person who chooses to trust myAngelVault means more to us than you might imagine.
Knowing that something born from our own family's story could make a difference in yours would be an incredible reward for everything we've put into it.
Thank you for taking the time to read our story.
And whatever you decide, there's one thing I hope you'll take away from it:
Life can change in an instant. Don't wait for a special occasion to tell someone how much they mean to you.
Say it today.
And if there are words you want them to have someday, make sure they can still reach them if life doesn't go as planned.
With love,
Szabolcs
Founder of myAngelVault, husband to Kriszti, and proud dad to Zéti and Levi.
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