Vanilla

Estate plans go stale. Clients forget what they signed, attorneys draft documents that sit untouched for a decade, and advisors rarely have the tools to surface what has changed or gone wrong. Vanilla is an AI-powered estate planning platform founded in 2019 by Steve Lockshin of AdvicePeriod, built originally for internal use before being commercialized for the broader advisor market. It holds a patented technology position and has a dedicated offering for multi-family offices and firms serving high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients.

For family office teams, the platform addresses a specific operational gap: turning complex, multi-entity estate documents into interactive visual diagrams that advisors can walk through with clients and their families. The MFO use case is explicit on the site, with features oriented around organizing estate data across large teams, engaging next-generation family members, and running scenario modeling for strategies such as GRATs, SLATs, and charitable vehicles.

Key capabilities relevant to family office workflows include:

• V/AI, an AI assistant that extracts data from estate documents, generates summaries, and traces every insight back to its source document
• Vanilla Scenarios for modeling estate tax outcomes and comparing strategies side-by-side
• Addepar integration with automated daily data syncing and customizable ownership mapping
• Document Builder for creating wills, trusts, powers of attorney, and healthcare directives across all 50 US states
• Estate Health Check for rapid assessment of planning gaps across a client book

The platform is US-focused, priced on a custom-quote basis for wealth management firms, and does not publish enterprise pricing publicly. A self-service Starter tier exists for smaller practices but lacks AI features and estate visualizations. Family offices outside the United States will find limited applicability given the US-centric document and tax framework.