There are good family tree sites already, and we will say so plainly on this page. We did not build Dynasty House because the others are worthless. We built it because every one of them asks you to give something up — your money on a renewal treadmill, your privacy to a shared free-for-all, or your patience to software that still looks like it did in 2012. Here is the honest map of where we are different, and where we are not.
Your tree is yours, even if you stop paying
This is the line that matters most. On Ancestry and MyHeritage, a tree above a few hundred people drops to read-only the moment your subscription lapses. The records you gathered are still on the screen, but you can no longer edit them, and getting a clean copy out is made deliberately awkward. We call this the tree ransom, and we built the company specifically to end it. On Dynasty House, a lapsed plan never locks or restricts your tree. You can edit it, and you can export a complete GEDCOM — every person, date, place and note — in one click, free, forever. If we ever stopped being the right home for your family, you could walk out the door with everything.
Flat pricing that does not climb
The big sites advertise a low first year and quietly raise it at renewal; a serious subscription runs well over a hundred dollars a year, often several hundred. Dynasty House is free for your first hundred people, and a flat four dollars a month after that. The price you join at is the price you keep. There are no DNA-kit ads, no record-subscription nags, no "upgrade to see this." Your tree, and nothing sold on top of it.
It is built to be beautiful
Most family history software is functional and grim. Gramps is powerful and completely free, but it is a desktop application that looks the part. FamilySearch is vast but dated. We think the place your ancestors live should be worth looking at — so the tree renders as a calm, pannable thing you actually want to open, and any branch can be published as its own family "House" at a real web address.
One ancestor, not thirty copies — but with a privacy line
Here is the subtle one. FamilySearch made a brave choice: a single shared tree that everyone edits together. The upside is collaboration. The downside is that a stranger can "correct" your great-grandmother overnight, and the privacy of living people is thin. The private sites avoid that by giving everyone a sealed copy — which means the same ancestor exists as thirty disconnected, half-finished records that never learn from each other.
Dynasty House takes the good half of each. A deceased person is one shared, sourced record that grows richer as relatives add documents and corrections — but changes arrive as proposals you can accept, not silent overwrites, and the living are protected by a kindred boundary so only close family see them. Collaborative where collaboration helps; private exactly where it should be.
AI that is built in, not bolted on
The incumbents are adding AI features the way large companies do: slowly, and around the edges. We started from the assumption that an AI assistant should be able to understand your tree and help with the actual work. So there is a House Historian that knows your family and helps you find the brick walls, and an open developer API — included with any paid plan — that lets an AI agent read and responsibly improve your tree. The agent does the digging; the results live in a beautiful, private, permanent home. No one else our size offers this, and the big sites are too heavy to turn quickly.
Where the big sites still win
We will not pretend otherwise. FamilySearch holds something like twenty billion records and a century of microfilm, free to everyone. Ancestry and MyHeritage have enormous record collections and DNA-matching networks we do not try to replicate. If your next step is searching census images or matching DNA cousins, those are the right tools, and they always will be. The honest framing is this: they are the world's great archives. Dynasty House is the beautiful, intelligent home you bring the findings back to. Export a GEDCOM from any of them and it renders here in about five seconds.
Who it is for
If you want the biggest pile of records, start at FamilySearch or Ancestry. If you want a free desktop tool and full local control, Gramps is excellent. If you want a tree that stays yours, costs little and never holds you hostage, that is genuinely lovely to look at, that protects the living while letting the dead become a shared inheritance, and that an AI can actually help you build — that is the gap we exist to fill.