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

38 points romeo19361 2 hours ago 24 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 1 hour ago | parent

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

romeo19361 1 hour 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 59 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, or doesn't answer, your lawyer and/or 2IC are informed. It's a great point you've raised.

AndrewKemendo 48 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 35 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 37 minutes ago | parent

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

romeo19361 14 minutes ago | parent

Would love the feedback and test, thankyou.

matt3210 31 minutes ago | parent

> Happy to answer any questions

Are you OK bro?

romeo19361 23 minutes ago | parent

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

aabhay 28 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 27 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 18 minutes ago | parent

Agreed.

romeo19361 15 minutes ago | parent

The readme goes through rehearsals and contacts reconfirm yearly, and I confirm each still has what they need. Thanks, mate.

vasco 27 minutes ago | parent

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

romeo19361 19 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:))

jubilee33 8 minutes ago | parent

I'm always too embarrassed to show the things I make on here. Some voice keeps telling me "they aren't really outstanding or novel qnd nobody will care"

But seeing the front page the past few months, maybe i should. Or not, I honestly don't know how to feel. İ like people sharing and having the courage to put their work out, but if this place gets cluttered with "i installed Linux on my AI laptop" Where then to go to find any interesting info. There is arvix? No frivolous things there right? :p

I liked the project by the way, even if it's a bit trivial.

romeo19361 3 minutes ago | parent

<3

mrheosuper 27 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 19 minutes ago | parent

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

romeo19361 9 minutes ago | parent

It's only one button to press each week. I don't have a Garmin, that would be interesting to connect it in that way for your use case.

mococa 18 minutes ago | parent

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

egamirorrim 10 minutes ago | parent

People still write things in PHP?

romeo19361 5 minutes ago | parent

PHP by Larry Ullman happened to be the first programming book I read in 2002. I love PHP and I can understand what Claude is doing with it.