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

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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.

HN · launched Oct 20, 2026 · 110 upvotes (top 9%) · 1 view

Niche: personal financial planning software · 96 launches, 10 in the last 7 days ▼ -38% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Workflow automation
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 96 launches in personal financial planning software →

Could you build this?

Yes A dead man's switch is CRUD plus scheduled check-ins and email or SMS notifications, all standard integrations a solo builder can vibe-code.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: deadmanswitch.com

Concerns raised: Weekly check-in may be too frequent, Longer intervals risk lapsed hosting payments, App store accounts tied to one person, hard to transfer, Decrypting end-to-end encrypted data after death, Hosting upkeep and continuity burden

Feature requests: Configurable check-in interval, Multiple instances for redundancy, Passive keepalive based on device use, Gaps of 2-3 months or more

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 31 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #4 of 32 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 347 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.