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Show HN: Death Plan Switch, a self-hosted dead man's switch for solo devs

29 points romeo19361 1 hour ago 17 comments

Hi HN,

I'm Peter Bishop and I've been working in graphics and web tech for over 25yrs.

I've recently launched Death Plan Switch to solve a major problem in my succession plan. What if I go missing or die? The right people are told and my business can continue to operate for my clients.

There's a backstory to this project, I was hospitalised in 2012 and lost my business back then and I couldn't get the data to my technical 2IC in time without frustrating my clients.

Death Plan Switch solves this problem, it's free to download and use or study under the MIT license.

I've been using it for the last few weeks. It was authored with the help of Claude Code after writing an extensive MD document and it passed 42 unit tests.

I hope you get some use out of it, or it inspires your own succession plans. My clients are telling me this is a strong sales feature when they trust me with their hosting and technology accounts.

Happy to answer any questions.

Kind regards, Peter Bishop.

N_Lens 49 minutes ago | parent

Nice, although it seems likely that I would overlook replying to the email and everyone will panic when they get notified.

romeo19361 47 minutes ago | parent

It's designed to send one email to check on you per week. Currently for me this is 9am Monday. I can't miss it because I'm selling my clients the death plan in my contracts. You can change the timing of the email to suit your needs. Thanks for the great feedback :))

romeo19361 44 minutes ago | parent

Also, if you miss the first email two more reminders are sent to you before emailing your next of kin. It's only when your next of kin says there's a problem, your lawyer and/or 2IC are informed. It's a great point you've raised.

AndrewKemendo 34 minutes ago | parent

I would make it monthly or quarterly not weekly

By the way Google has had this for a while and I signed up for it back in 2018 or so.

they check in it feels like quarterly at most

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en

romeo19361 20 minutes ago | parent

For version 1 we decided for the check-in to be weekly because it can still take 13 days for the Switch to tell the lawyer and/or the 2IC where our master keys are held. Thanks for the link, this isn't locked to google accounts, it's more so for the 2IC to ensure business continuity with servers domains Dropbox etc.

iugtmkbdfil834 22 minutes ago | parent

Love it. Will test. Initial feedback: consider configurable timetable threshold ( not everyone will want the same ).

matt3210 17 minutes ago | parent

> Happy to answer any questions

Are you OK bro?

romeo19361 8 minutes ago | parent

Yes — healthy and fine. I checked in with my Switch yesterday:))

aabhay 14 minutes ago | parent

> I’ve been testing it for one week

So, you haven’t had enough time to even encounter most edge cases :)

Shank 13 minutes ago | parent

This is an area of planning known as "business continuity planning" and as part of this process, you should have a document and written procedures that are executed by humans, not computers, and tested as part of this. For example, your BCP should include people who are already trusted and know how your infrastructure works, and you should do a dress rehearsal on a yearly basis at least. A notification tool is one thing, but realistically this should be just one of your tools.

romeo19361 4 minutes ago | parent

Agreed.

vasco 12 minutes ago | parent

Why do people share projects that can be made in 10 prompts?

romeo19361 5 minutes ago | parent

I shared it because my business had the need and to inspire others to think about succession. It's dead simple to build with or without AI for a seasoned coder:))

mrheosuper 12 minutes ago | parent

Nice, i have similar idea for a while, with some additional features:

- Easy to use, my idea is just have a telegram/facebook chatbot, people talk to it in plain English, what is their message, the receiver and the watch time.

- Multi reminder: For example, you can set 3 days to send message 1, 10 days to send message 2 and so on. The idea is the message 1 can be "You are receiving this message because XXX has something to talk, please contact them if you can ASAP". So that if you forgot to "kick the dog" 1 day, your deep personal message won't be sent immediately.

bmoathn 4 minutes ago | parent

interesting concept. feels high gain at 1/wk. like, can it subscribe to my garmin connect or something?

mococa 3 minutes ago | parent

You’d use temporal workflows, this operation should never fail