Why this exists, and what changed
ChangeNames exists because of one personal experience. I changed my own name by deed poll, and only afterwards found out how many people pay £20-£30 for something the actual legal process makes free. Most people never find that out. ChangeNames is here so they do: a free, legally valid deed poll, no charge, ever. The name itself is one I've held for years, long before any of what follows.
Reaching those people meant contacting creators who'd already made videos about deed polls, so their audiences would hear the same thing: you don't have to pay for this. That's what the email behind this story was, one of many sent with that single purpose. It went to someone who runs a much older, well established free deed poll service of his own, because he'd written about deed polls himself. He wrote back with real concerns about an early version of this tool. He was right about most of it.
The .co.uk domain had lapsed around that time, the DNS expired and hadn't been renewed. In that gap he registered it himself and pointed it at a post laying out his concerns. Separately, the site was using a third party mailing tool to send the finished document by email, a cheaper way to run it with less day-to-day management. That tradeoff cost quality, and it showed: the mailing tool's free tier pushed people toward mailing lists we did not know about and did not want, the template had a legal gap around the British Nationality Act 1981 and an ambiguity in the professional name clause, there was no privacy policy, and a link to our TikTok was broken. None of that is good enough for a tool that exists to help people for free.
So it got rebuilt, properly, from the form up.
No third party sends emails on our behalf. That entire piece was removed.
The document is built and downloaded in your browser. Sending yourself a copy by email is optional.
Your name, address and witness details never touch our server, whether you email yourself a copy or not.
Added in full, up front, not buried in a footer link.
The citizenship clause and the template gaps were fixed.
changenames.co.uk was bought outright once we knew we needed it. See below.
Do not take our word for any of the above. You can check the important claim in about thirty seconds, without any technical knowledge.
- Open the deed poll generator.
- Press F12, or right click and choose Inspect, then open the Network tab.
- Fill the form in and generate your deed poll.
- Watch the Network tab. Your name, address and witness details are never sent anywhere. The document is built in your browser and downloaded from it.
The only time anything leaves your browser is if you choose to email yourself a copy, which is optional and clearly marked. Nothing is stored, and there is no mailing list to join.
He changed his mind. In the same email thread, once he saw the fixes, he wrote that the changes were "enormous strides in the right direction" and that he was genuinely impressed, and he agreed the original data mix-up was negligence, not malice. He also transferred changenames.co.uk across for exactly what he'd paid for it, no markup.
None of that has made it onto his own site yet. He said he'd write a correction and link it at the top of his original post, then said the same again a few days later, both times genuinely, both times followed by a real reason it hadn't happened yet, personal health issues at the time. That's where it was left. This page exists because that correction hasn't landed publicly, even though the change of mind behind it is real and it's in writing.
The tool is free. It was always meant to be free. It works properly now.