A $50 estate plan, prepared online under a law firm's supervision.

What APEX is

APEX is an online service that lets an individual prepare a complete, state-specific core estate plan for a flat fee of $50, sign it correctly under their own state's rules, and keep the signed originals in an encrypted digital vault. It is positioned as a document-preparation and client-portal service operated under the supervision of a law firm's wills, trusts and estates practice. It does not give individual legal advice; matters that need advice are routed to a licensed attorney for a separately priced review.

The business case is volume: state-specific templates, a rules engine that encodes each state's signing formalities, and an AI-guided interview replace the attorney hours that routine, low-complexity estate plans would otherwise consume. The market memo that came with the build puts $50 well below every paid competitor (LegalZoom's closest bundle at $99, Trust & Will at $199) and at roughly five percent of the national median attorney fee for a will-based plan.

What the $50 buys

Plus state-specific signing instructions

An interactive checklist tells the client how many witnesses their state requires, whether witnesses may be beneficiaries, whether a notary is required or merely advisable, and whether the state allows electronic wills or remote online notarization. Where remote notarization is allowed, the platform hands off to a live online notary session. Where it is not, the client gets printed instructions for signing in person.

The add-ons

• Digital Lockbox, $0.99 a month. Ongoing encrypted storage of drafts and signed originals, downloadable at any time, with a delayed, notice-based emergency-access path for trusted contacts such as a spouse, adult child or the named executor. Includes an insurance-policy locker with plain-English AI summaries of coverage and fillable inventory schedules.
• Attorney review, priced separately. The client's answers and generated documents go to a firm attorney or a vetted local-counsel partner licensed in the client's state, who can redline, approve or reject with comments. This step does create an attorney-client relationship; the base service does not.
• Attorney directory, $5 a month per listed attorney. A public directory ranked by zip code and specialty, where listed attorneys can bid for ranking position and publish articles through an editorial workflow.

How a client uses it

1. Create an account. Email and phone are both verified, and multi-factor authentication is mandatory before anything else happens.
2. Select a state. This drives which templates apply, what the signing instructions say, and what the AI interview is allowed to discuss.
3. Pay the $50. Payment is a hard gate before the interview. Full refund within 72 hours as long as no document has been downloaded.
4. Answer guided questions. An AI receptionist runs a branching interview that adapts to marital status, children, property and prior wills, opens with the not-a-lawyer disclosure, refuses to give personal advice, and escalates complex situations to attorney review. The session can be resumed on any device.
5. Generate the documents. PDF plus an editable Word version, in under about thirty seconds.
6. Sign correctly. The state-specific checklist above, or a remote notary session where the state allows it.
7. Upload the signed originals to the vault, where drafts and executed versions are kept permanently. Later amendments create a new version rather than overwriting history.

Email and text notifications fire at every step, and clients who stall (paid but never finished, generated but never downloaded, downloaded but never signed) get a scheduled sequence of reminders.

Who is on the other side

A legal-update monitor watches for changes in state law and raises flags with citations. Flags are never shown to clients until a supervising attorney verifies and publishes them.