alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Death Plan Switch, a self-hosted dead man's switch for solo devs
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.
Comments
> independent web developers
Hmmm... the market is kinda narrow.
But more importantly, say I self-hosted this service, then, I have to answering emails for the rest of my life telling a program I'm still alive. It's kinda high maintenance all on it's own.
That is assuming this service continuous to run without upkeep, at very least keeping it powered, and connected to the Internet. I'm not really sure what comes first, the end of my life or I got bored of doing it.
I know it sounded inapplicable for a lot of people especially who do remote works, but still if you're thinking about letting a machine run your death plan, maybe it's also the time to start make people connections, such as with lawyers, partners etc, people you can trust and have the capability of handling issues.
Also, if you do remote work, maybe setup an account inheritance plan if the platform supports it, assuming the account is dedicated for working for the effected team of course.
Also also, just an idea, what if you make the check passive? Instead of having to answer emails, some automated procedure will send keepalives to tell the program to not trigger? That will massively lower the cost of using it.
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.
I notice that your github README says that you don't accept pull-requests, that's fine, but you've still got them enabled upon the project. Perhaps you should go to your repository settings, and disable them?
Hi Peter. This is advice I give to every AI product now, not just yours. Nothing personal.
It's fine to use AI to create the product – but please, for the love of god, write your own copy. When someone can't be bothered writing their own landing page, I assume they're just not that bothered about the product.
Nice, although it seems likely that I would overlook replying to the email and everyone will panic when they get notified.
Fun base rate: at 45 your odds of dying in a given week are about 1 in 16,000. So basically every missed check-in is going to be a holiday or a full inbox.
From my experience, there is no everlasting digital system, no matter how many fallbacks you add. So I wonder, how can you ensure, this still works after e. g. 1 year?
interesting concept. feels high gain at 1/wk. like, can it subscribe to my garmin connect or something?
Love it. Will test. Initial feedback: consider configurable timetable threshold ( not everyone will want the same ).
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
You’d use temporal workflows, this operation should never fail
> What if I go missing or die? The right people are told and my business can continue to operate for *my clients*... 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*... *My clients* are telling me this is a strong sales feature when they trust me with their hosting and technology accounts.
I am not sure why this focus on clients in a context like this feels unsettling to me, but it does.
> I’ve been testing it for one week
So, you haven’t had enough time to even encounter most edge cases :)
> and it passed 42 unit tests
wowww 42 unit tests that Claude made up
I was into it until you considered this a level of assurance
feels like you’ve been out of the software industry for a decade or two
but maybe you know your clientele and they would find this validating. I’ve entered into a couple industries over time where complete non sequiturs are what sold products. “So-and-so has this random unrelated credential, and thats why he will be the trusted partner for this commodities shipment he has no experience in”
Nice Work! I know you have a deep expertise in your domain, but I think you may wanna de-slop the website since it pretty looks like ai-generated.
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Why do people share projects that can be made in 10 prompts?
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.