I built a dead man's switch for my own secrets. Here's why I couldn't stop.
For a while I had a folder on my laptop called something embarrassing like important/. Wi-Fi passwords. Two crypto wallets I keep meaning to consolidate. Scans of my passport. A note with the password to my password manager the one my partner would need if anything happened to me.
That folder was a wish, not a plan. Plain files behind FileVault. I'd known for ages that "just look in important/ if something happens" wasn't a system. I just hadn't found a system I trusted enough to replace it.
So I went looking. Here's what I found:
Password manager emergency access (1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane) paywalled, ecosystem-locked, and every single one stores keys somewhere you're asked to trust. LastPass already taught us how that ends.
Dead man's switch services like deadmansswitch.net mostly email-based, none of them are end-to-end encrypted. You hand them your secrets in clear text and pray.
Apple Legacy Contact / Google Inactive Account Manager built-in, free, useful, but useless outside their orbit. No crypto seeds, no files, no third-party recipients.
Pen and paper in a safe honestly still the gold standard if your threat model is "I die." Terrible if it's "I'm in a coma for six months."
I'm a privacy-leaning dev. I don't like trusting other companies with the things that matter most. But I also know my mom is not going to recite an AES key. So I wanted one tool that did all of this:
Encrypt every secret fully on my device. The provider me should never be able to read it, even if breached or subpoenaed.
Hand secrets off automatically when I stop checking in, on a timer I control.
Put zero burden on the recipient. They tap a notification, they get the thing.
Work offline. Airplane mode, bad signal, dead Wi-Fi the vault still opens.
Be free for solo use. The "what if I'm gone" feature is the only thing I'd ever charge for.
Nothing on the market did all five. So I started building one. The result is AbsentKey.
What I genuinely love about how it came out:
Per-secret keys. Compromising one share doesn't compromise the vault.
Keys are derived on-device and never reach my server. I cannot decrypt anyone's stuff. I had to design the entire sync protocol around that constraint, which made the project ten times harder and ten times better.
Waiting time is per-recipient. Your partner can have one day. Your lawyer can have ninety. Your kid can have a year. Nobody's rule has to match anyone else's.
No daily check-ins. Every other dead man's switch makes you confirm you're alive on a schedule. I hated that. With AbsentKey, you just live your life the timer ticks in the background.
Receiving is free, forever. I'm not charging the person inheriting your passwords. This seemed obvious to me. Apparently it isn't obvious to everyone in this space.
Free forever for solo use. If you never share anything, you never pay me anything, and the app still works.
Marketing is going badly and I'll probably come back to whine about it, but I didn't want my first post here to be the whine. I wanted to write down why this got built, because the reason matters more than the launch.
If you want a look: absentkey.com. And if you've shipped something nobody asked for, I'd love to hear what kept you going through the first year of silence.
