Is an online will enough, or do you need a lawyer?

What you are actually choosing between

The comparison is usually framed as a cheap will against an expensive one, which is why it feels like a question about money. It is not. An online platform sells you a document assembled from your answers. A lawyer sells you a judgment about what the answers should be. Both produce a will; only one of them tells you that the will is the wrong instrument for what you are trying to do.

So the useful question is not which is better. It is whether your situation is one where the answers are obvious. For a great many people they are: one marriage, shared children, a house, some accounts, and an intention that everything goes to the survivor and then to the children. A form handles that, and has done for as long as there have been forms.

The alternative most people are actually choosing between is not lawyer or platform. It is a will or nothing — and nothing is a decision too, made by the state's intestacy statute on your behalf. If the choice on this page is making you postpone, take the free route below today and improve on it later. A signed simple will beats a perfect unsigned one.

Sahvelo has no view on which product you use and does not sell one. What it can do is set out the list of situations where the form stops being enough — because that list already exists, in public, written by people with nothing to sell you.

The list two states print, for nothing, on the form itself

California and Michigan each wrote a complete will into their statute books. Anybody may use them and they cost nothing. What makes them unusually valuable is not the form — it is the notice printed beside it, which is each state's own account of what its free will does not do.^{Source 1Source 3}

California's runs as a question and answer, and answers the tax question first: the form "is not designed to reduce death taxes or other taxes". It then names when to stop and see a lawyer — if the estate is worth more than the amount federal law excludes from estate tax at your death, if you own business assets, if you want to set up a trust fund for a child, if you own assets in another state, if you want to disinherit a spouse, domestic partner or descendant, or if you have valuable pension or profit-sharing interests. A separate sentence adds stepchildren and foster children you have not adopted.^{Source 1}

Michigan's notice is shorter and hits the assumption that costs families the most. Its statutory will, it says, "has no effect on jointly held assets, on retirement plan benefits, or on life insurance on your life if you have named a beneficiary who survives you" — which for many households is most of what they own. It is "not designed to reduce estate taxes". And the legislature was sufficiently determined that the warnings be read that it requires anyone printing the form to reproduce it verbatim, with the notice "printed in 10-point boldfaced type".^{Source 3}

Read those two notices together and you have the industry's upgrade prompt, for free and in advance. Every platform that offers to escalate you to an attorney is selling some version of this list. You can check yourself against it in ten minutes, before you have spent anything.

The free route, and what it actually costs you

"Free" here means genuinely free, not a trial. Where a state publishes a statutory will, the form is in the statute, you may copy it, and a will made on it is valid — Michigan's provides in terms that a will executed in the prescribed form "is a valid will".^{Source 3}

The price is that it is narrow, and deliberately so. You may fill in the blanks and nothing else: California answers the question of whether words may be added or crossed out with a flat no, and warns that doing it may invalidate the will or cause the court to ignore what you wrote. Michigan gives the same warning and its form caps what it can carry — in its own words, "I can leave no more than 2 cash gifts". A trust cannot be built with the California form at all; the statute says trusts are too complicated to be used in it.^{Source 1Source 3}

Two things follow. First, the free form is a good fit for exactly the simple case a platform's cheapest tier is also a good fit for — so if that is your situation, the interesting comparison is between free and free. Second, the moment your intentions need a sentence the form does not contain, you have left the free route, and no amount of careful handwriting brings you back to it.

Most states publish no will form of their own. Where none exists, the free route is not a form at all: it is a plainly written will, typed, signed and witnessed exactly the way your state requires. That is a real option and it is the one that most rewards care over money.

Six situations where a form stops working

These are the six the statutes themselves name. Each one below says what actually goes wrong, because that is what lets you judge whether it applies to you rather than guess. Any one of them is a reason to buy an hour of advice; none of them is a reason to buy a whole estate plan.

A second family, or a child who is not both of yours

This is the situation the forms flag hardest and the one families most often think is simple. California's own notice tells the reader to see a lawyer if they want to disinherit a spouse or descendant, and adds stepchildren and foster children who were never adopted — who, on most forms, inherit nothing whatever the reader believes. In the other direction a will cannot quietly cut a spouse out either: in Michigan a spouse who dislikes the will may elect against it and take half of what intestacy would have given them, less half of what reaches them by any other route. Two households, one document, and the assumptions that hold a family together are exactly the ones a form cannot record.^{Source 1Source 6}

A beneficiary on SSI or Medicaid

If someone in the will receives Supplemental Security Income or Medicaid — an adult child with a disability, most often — an ordinary gift can end their benefits on the day it arrives: the resource ceiling is $2,000 for an individual, and the schedule of figures in the regulation stops at 1 January 1989. It is not indexed and it never has been, so the size of the legacy is almost beside the point — one ordinary savings account clears the limit several times over.^{Source 10}

The order in which the money moves is the whole thing. Money left to a trust for a disabled person was never theirs, so the Medicaid trust rules — which bite on assets of the individual — do not reach it. The same money left to them outright becomes theirs on arrival, and sheltering it afterwards means a trust of their own assets, which works only if they are under 65 and only if the state is repaid from whatever is left when they die. Left outright and then fixed, the same gift costs the family the payback. This is the situation on this page where a home-made document does active harm.^{Source 11}

A business you own a share of

California names business-related assets in its list, and the reason is that a will can only pass what you own — it cannot override an operating agreement, a partnership deed or a buy-sell clause that already says what happens to your share. If those documents and the will disagree, the will loses, and the family finds out during probate.^{Source 1}

Property in another state

Named in California's list too, and the mechanism is procedural rather than dramatic: land is administered where it sits, so a second, separate proceeding runs in that state on top of the one at home. It is a frequent way a straightforward estate acquires a second lawyer, a second court and several extra months.^{Source 1}

An estate your own state taxes

California's notice points at the federal exclusion, which is where most people stop looking — and it is the wrong line in several states. Illinois taxes estates over $4,000,000, a figure that has not moved since 2013 and is not indexed, so an Illinois family can owe their own state a great deal while owing the IRS nothing. A house and a retirement account get there faster than the threshold implies.^{Source 9}

A contest you can already see coming

If you are disinheriting someone, dividing unevenly between children, or leaving a large gift outside the family, what protects the will is the quality of its execution — and the formalities are exactly what a rushed document lacks. California will let an uncontested will be proved on one witness's sworn affidavit, and an attestation clause in the will itself can carry it; and where a beneficiary signs as a witness, California presumes that witness pressured the testator and caps what they may keep. Both rules reward doing the signing properly and punish improvising it.^{Source 7Source 8}

The part no product does for you

Whatever you pay, the document arrives as a file. Everything that turns it into a will is yours to do, and it is where the failures are.

Signing it. Every state has its own rule and they differ more than the word “witness” suggests — California's statutory will has a stricter one than an ordinary California will, requiring each witness to observe the signing itself and to sign in the testator's presence, so a form taken away and signed later by somebody who was not in the room has not been executed the way the section requires.^{Source 2}

Funding anything you were sold. A trust that owns nothing does nothing: it works only on assets retitled into it, and no platform can retitle a house or a bank account for you. A revocable trust bought and never funded leaves the estate exactly as it would have been without it, having paid for the document.

Checking what the will does not control. Retirement accounts, life insurance and anything held jointly pass by their own paperwork, and Michigan's notice says so on the face of its form. If the beneficiary designation and the will disagree, the designation wins — which makes an afternoon spent checking those forms the highest-value hour in this whole exercise, and it is free.^{Source 3}

Storing it and saying where it is. The recurring failure is not a bad hiding place but a good one nobody was told about. Tell your executor where the original is and make sure they can reach it without a court order.

Buying help without buying a whole plan

If one of the six applies, the purchase you need is usually much smaller than the one you will be offered. Ask for it in those terms.

A bounded engagement is a fair thing to request: a flat fee, a written scope, and a stated answer on whether the fee includes supervising the signing. A single consultation about the one complication — the stepchildren, the disabled beneficiary, the out-of-state cottage — is often the whole of what you need, with the rest of the document done the cheap way. Ask what the fee includes, ask who keeps the original, and ask whether they will look at your beneficiary designations, because that is where the money actually is.

Before paying anything, check three free routes people routinely miss. Employer benefits: a great many employees have a prepaid legal plan they have never used, and a simple will is the classic covered item. Legal aid: free civil legal help is means-tested but real, and wills for older adults are commonly within scope. And for anyone over sixty, the aging network funds free legal assistance through Area Agencies on Aging — the same number that answers questions about care answers this one.

One thing to be sceptical of in either direction: a fixed price for a "complete estate plan" that arrives before anyone has asked whether you have a business, a second family or property elsewhere. The questions on this page are the ones that decide what you need. A seller who has not asked them — platform or firm — is pricing a package, not answering your situation.