Two ways this ends, and you can reach the money in both.

A gift waits 30 days. If nobody opens it in that time it returns to you automatically and at no cost — you do not have to notice, and you do not have to do anything.

We nudge you at day 7 and day 25. Those emails tell you what is happening and offer to send it again; they do not use a countdown, a warning colour, or the word “last chance”. An unopened gift is not a problem to be pressured about.

You can also cancel at any point before somebody opens it, in one tap, and get it straight back.

At any moment a gift is in exactly one of five states, and only two of them are final. This is the whole state machine and there is nothing hidden behind it:

• WaitingSent, not yet opened. You can cancel it. It expires in 30 days.
• ExpiredNobody opened it in time. You can take it back whenever you like.
• Not available thereThe person who opened it lives somewhere this is not offered. You can take it back.
• OpenedFinal. It belongs to them.
• ReturnedFinal. It belongs to you again.

The three non-final states all leave you able to reach the money. The two final ones each put it definitively with one person. There is no state in which a gift sits somewhere neither of you can get to it, and that is a property of how the thing is built rather than a promise we are making.

Nobody at Giftur can take your gift, and nobody at Giftur can get it back for you if you lose your sign-in.

The first half is the reason to trust us: there is no button on our side that moves your gift, and no member of staff who could be talked into pressing one. The second half is the cost of the first: if you lose access to every way you have of signing in, there is genuinely nothing we can do, because we do not hold anything that could get it back for you.

That is why signing in is deliberately boring — your face or fingerprint on your own phone, with an email code as a second route in. Two ways, so losing one is an inconvenience rather than a disaster. Nothing to write on a piece of paper and put in a drawer.

What happens if I get a new phone

Whoever holds the link can open the gift. That is the same arrangement as putting a twenty in a card, and it is the right trade — it is what lets somebody receive a gift without an account, an app, or a form.

It also means you should send it the way you would send cash: directly to the person, not into a group chat. The preview that appears in a message never shows the amount, so a link does not announce that it is worth stealing. Above $250 we suggest adding a four-digit code that you pass on separately.

The part of the link after the # is what proves ownership, and your browser never sends it to any server — not ours, not anyone’s. We cannot read it, log it, or recover it. That is the reason a gift is genuinely yours and also the reason we cannot help if the link is lost.

Stock Tokens are not offered in the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom. If the person opening a gift is in one of those countries, the gift goes back to whoever sent it. There is no workaround.

This is harder here than in most products, because the person opening a gift is not the person who sent it and the sender cannot control who taps the link. So it is checked when the gift is opened, and “not available where you are” is a designed screen with a plain explanation, not an error page. The gift goes back to the sender and nobody loses anything.

We will not suggest a way around this and there are no jokes about it anywhere on this site.

The value can go down as well as up. What it is worth when you sell it may be less than it was worth today.

A gift holds the shares rather than the dollars. If the company’s price rises between sending and opening, the person receiving it gets the gain; if it falls, they get less than was paid. That is stated in the send flow before you pay and on the gift itself before anybody can sell anything — not in a footer, and not in grey.

Nothing on this site promises a return, and nothing on it should be read as investment advice.

Gifts have tax consequences in most places — for the person giving, the person receiving, or both, and again when something is sold. The rules differ by country and we are not able to give tax advice.

What we do provide is a plain record of what was received, when, and what it was worth at the time, exportable by the person who received it.

People give money to children constantly, and a birthday gift to a fourteen-year-old is the most natural use of this product there is. We have still set a minimum age of 16 to open a gift, and the reasoning is written out in the project’s decision log rather than hidden.

In short: opening a gift creates a holding in a regulated instrument in the recipient’s own name, the rules for minors holding one differ by country, and getting that wrong is worse than being briefly disappointing. A gift sent to somebody under 16 returns to the sender with an explanation.