About · the founding note
Why this exists
ValidThru is a tracker for expiration dates — the passport, the license, the insurance, the inspection sticker, the furnace filter, the free trial that quietly becomes a paid one. One place for the dates, and reminders that arrive while renewing is still easy.
Free for 15 items, no card — create an account.
It started with a ticket
THE STORY · P. 1It started with a $130 ticket for an inspection sticker that had expired three weeks earlier, on a car driven every day past a sticker nobody reads. The strange part was not the ticket. Everything needed to avoid it already existed — the date was printed on the sticker and the renewal took twenty minutes. What did not exist was one boring, reliable place where that date lived alongside all the others.
Missed renewals are expensive out of proportion to the work they take.
An expired passport can cost a trip. An expired registration costs a fine. A lapsed certification can cost a contract. Calendar apps treat these like dentist appointments — one alert, easily dismissed — and document apps want to keep your whole passport forever, which is a lot of trust to hand over for one line of text. ValidThru is the narrow thing in between: it tracks the dates themselves, asks for as little as possible, and keeps nothing you scan.
The name
THE NAME · P. 2VALID THRU is the line embossed on every card in your wallet — the two words that turn a number into a deadline.
The name comes from that line. The mark is a ring doing the same work: it fills as an item moves through its lifetime, wrapping toward midnight — a fresh renewal is a thin arc, an expired item a closed circle. The product does what the phrase does, for everything else you carry.
How we carry ourselves
POSTURE · P. 3Calm competence, and no claims we cannot keep. The product is holding renewal dates and, optionally, document numbers — it should sound like a competent person delivering accurate information, not a brand having feelings.
Track dates, not documents
A label and a date are enough to track anything. Identifiers are an opt-in extra, useful when a renewal is close and unnecessary the rest of the year. The app never nags you to give it more than you want it to have.
Nothing you upload is stored
A scanned document is read in the moment and discarded immediately. We keep the three fields you confirm — document type, issuer, expiration date — and nothing else. Data we do not hold is data nobody can lose, leak, or demand.
Lead time is the product
A reminder that arrives when acting is still easy is worth ten that arrive when it is urgent. Set your own lead time on each item — weeks for a passport, days for a filter.
Say only what is true
Our security page names what each protection covers and where it stops, including the things we deliberately do not claim. No absolutes, no borrowed vocabulary, no promise we could not keep in front of a judge.
How we make money
MONEY · P. 4Subscriptions. That is the whole list. Pricing is public — $19.99 a year, or $2.99 a month — and it funds everything. We do not sell data, we do not run ads, and we do not make leaving expensive: export is free on every tier and cancelling never deletes anything. A product that reminds you to leave subscriptions you forgot about should be easy to leave itself.
Where we are
STATUS · P. 5ValidThru is live, and every part of it works today — including the parts we would rather have shipped later.
Who is behind it, and how to reach us
CONTACT · P. 6A small independent team in Chicago — the kind of company where the person answering support email also wrote the reminder scheduler. Deliberately boring: no growth targets that would tempt us to hold your data longer, and no investors pushing an advertising model.
Questions, ideas, kind words, unkind words.
We answer within one business day.
Vulnerability reports — terms in the trust center.