Stream and download your films, videos, and photos from any device. Share with family. Cancel and keep your files. Year one is included free on every order — and after that, it’s a small annual subscription that costs less than a couple of streaming services combined.
When most digitization services finish your order, they ship you a USB drive and a download link that expires in 30 days. Six months later, you can't remember where the drive is. The download link is dead. And nobody in your family has access to any of it.
The Vault is the alternative. Your digitized footage lives in a private, searchable web application that you access from any browser or mobile device. Stream it like Netflix. Download originals when you want a local copy. Share specific reels with family members so your siblings, kids, or grandkids can actually watch the wedding from 1987 without you having to ship them a hard drive.
It’s the recurring relationship that makes a digitization order useful in year five, year ten, year twenty — instead of useful for the six weeks it takes to lose track of the USB drive.
Every digitization order includes Vault access free for the first year. After year one, it’s a small annual subscription — three tiers, cancel anytime, you always keep your files. Most customers stay subscribed because the cost is meaningfully less than what most families spend on streaming services in a single month.
Year one of any tier is included free on every order. After year one, pick the tier that fits your collection size and how many people need access. Most families pick Family — the math works out to less than $7 per month for the whole household.
For: A small order: a few reels of Super 8, a single VHS collection, or a photo box. Single-person access; no family sharing.
For: A typical family digitization project — home movies, photo albums, a few VHS tapes. Most orders fit comfortably under 150 GB. Spouse, kids, siblings, parents all get their own access.
For: Large family archives, multi-generation collections, estates with many heirs needing access, or anyone who's done a 4K Archival film order. Common when total digitized output exceeds 150 GB.
Tier caps are abstract until you see real orders. Here are the kinds of collections each tier comfortably holds — pick by how your collection compares.
A typical Preservation-tier film order, family sharing, or 4K Archival work.
Single-format, single-user orders. Watch-and-share quality.
A 4K Archival film order — those need Archive tier.
The default and most-chosen. Spouse + kids + siblings each get their own login.
Very large institutional collections (>500 GB) — contact us for a custom tier.
Unlimited members with role-based access. The right call for any Archival-tier work.
Not sure which tier matches your order? The live estimator recommends a tier based on the actual GB your specific order produces — including format, resolution, and tier multipliers.
The fair question: $29–$179/yr for storage when iCloud and Google Drive exist. The honest answer: those services aren't built for digitized footage, and a USB drive is a single-point-of-failure with no sharing or search. Here's the comparison.
| Capability | FPL Vault | USB drive only | Generic cloudiCloud / Drive / Dropbox |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 included with every order | Add-on: $65–$189 | Separate sub | |
| Streaming-optimized for ProRes / DPX | Slow, often fails on large masters | ||
| Browser-based, any device | Requires connection + drive present | ||
| Family sharing, per-person access | All-or-nothing share links | ||
| Search by reel name, date, tags | File names only | File names only | |
| Geographic redundancy + automated backup | Drive can fail (5–10 yr lifespan) | ||
| Organized as the lab returns it | Manual organization needed | Manual organization needed | |
| Files always downloadable | They’re already there | ||
| Cancel anytime, keep your files | n/a | yes (mostly) | |
| Designed for digitized media specifically |
You only need offline access, you’re tech-confident enough to manage your own backup, and you don’t need family members to be able to view files without you handing them the drive. Order Vault Lite ($29/yr) plus a USB drive, use Y1 free, and decide whether to renew at the end. The drive is yours regardless.
You only have the H.264 access copies (small files) and you’re comfortable losing the ProRes masters. Generic cloud doesn’t stream large ProRes well and doesn’t organize media — but if your only need is small video files alongside your photos and documents, it works. Most customers use generic cloud for downstream sharing of select clips, not as the primary archive.
The honest summary: Vault is the right call when the digitized footage is the point — when family will use it, when search and organization matter, when the ProRes masters need to stream. For everything else, the year of free access lets you decide.
Three core capabilities, each designed around a specific failure mode of how families currently store digitized footage.
Open a browser on your laptop, tablet, or phone. Sign in. Hit play on any of your reels. The video streams in adaptive quality — full resolution on a desktop, scaled appropriately on mobile so it works on hotel WiFi without buffering.
No app to install. No drive to plug in. No DVD to find. Your daughter is at college and wants to watch the home movie of her fifth birthday — she pulls up the Vault on her phone and watches it.
The Vault isn’t a walled garden. Every file is downloadable in its original delivery format — H.264 from Access, ProRes 422 HQ from Preservation, ProRes 4444 + DPX from Archival. Download a single reel, a whole album, or your entire vault as a ZIP archive whenever you want.
This matters because the Vault is convenience, not lock-in. If you want to put copies on a NAS, your iCloud, your home Plex server, an external SSD — go ahead. The originals are yours; downloading them is a one-click operation; and your downloaded copies don’t depend on the Vault for anything.
The Family tier ($79/yr) and Archive tier ($179/yr) include family sharing. You invite family members by email; each one gets their own login to your Vault. They can stream and download whatever you’ve granted them access to.
Sharing is granular. Maybe your siblings get access to all the family home movies but not your private wedding video. Maybe your cousin only needs to see one specific reel. You decide per-person and per-collection — not one global "everyone sees everything" switch.
The Vault runs on enterprise-grade infrastructure with the security characteristics that infrastructure provides — encryption in transit and at rest, geographic redundancy, regular automated backups. The shorter version: your home movies are safer here than they were on the original VHS tape.
All file uploads, streams, and downloads use TLS encryption. All stored files are encrypted at rest in our object storage. Standard practice for any modern storage service, called out so you know it’s there.
Files are stored on Cloudflare R2, an enterprise object-storage service used by major media platforms. Built-in geographic redundancy means your files exist in multiple physical locations, automatically.
Only you and the family members you explicitly invite can see your Vault. We don’t sell, share, or analyze the contents of your files. We have access to your files only as needed for technical support — never for any other purpose.
A subscription that holds your files hostage isn't a service — it's extortion. The Vault is the opposite: cancel any time, and you get a window to download everything before access ends. The files are yours, regardless.
No phone calls, no retention specialists, no hoops. Cancel from your Vault settings any time. You receive an immediate confirmation email with the date your access ends and instructions for downloading your files.
Access continues for 30 days after cancellation. You can stream, download individual files, or use the bulk-export tool to pull your entire vault as a ZIP archive — files organized exactly as they appeared in the Vault.
After the 30-day window ends, your files are permanently deleted from our storage and from all backups within 90 days. We do not retain copies of customer files after cancellation. You receive a final confirmation when deletion is complete.
The questions that come up most often about Vault subscriptions, sharing, and what happens to your files if you cancel.
You don’t subscribe today. You order a digitization project, your Vault gets created automatically, and the first year is included. Then you decide what to do.