When DIY Digital Legacy Goes Wrong

I understand the appeal of building your own dead man's switch. You want complete control, no third-party dependencies, and the satisfaction of creating something exactly tailored to your needs. As someone who loves building things, I completely get it.

But I also need to share what I've learned about why self-hosted switches have a troubling failure rate when people need them most. It's not just about technical complexity—though that's certainly part of it—it's about the human elements that are impossible to engineer around.

Self-hosted systems require constant maintenance, security updates, server management, and monitoring. When you're building for your own death, you're creating a system that must work perfectly at exactly the moment when you can no longer fix, update, or maintain it.

We've seen brilliant engineers create sophisticated switches that failed because of expired SSL certificates, outdated email providers, server hosting changes, or simple configuration drift over time. The technical challenges are solvable, but they require ongoing attention that becomes impossible after death.

There's also the emotional burden on your loved ones. When your self-hosted system fails, they're left trying to troubleshoot your code, understand your infrastructure, and debug your configuration while grieving your loss. That's not the legacy most people want to leave.

This isn't about technical capability—many of you are far more skilled than our team. It's about the unique challenge of building something that must outlive its creator while requiring zero maintenance from people who never asked to become system administrators.

If you choose the self-hosted route, please document everything extensively, automate all maintenance, plan for service dependencies, and most importantly, have a backup plan when your primary system inevitably encounters issues.