Every few months Hacker News revisits the same question: what happens to your digital life when you die? The answers are always ad hoc: password managers shared with a spouse, spreadsheets of account statements, dead man's switch emails that family might mistake for spam. Platform-specific tools (Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager) only cover their own ecosystems. Nobody has built a unified orchestrator that handles cross-platform account inventory, 2FA backup codes, conditional access delegation, and automated notification across services. The demand resurfaces because nothing adequate exists.
builder note
The recurring nature of this HN question IS the signal. It surfaces every 12-18 months because nobody ships a satisfying answer. The hard part isn't the vault (solved) or the dead man's switch (solved). It's the orchestration layer: automated 2FA handoff, platform-specific API integrations for account closure/transfer, and a guided walkthrough for a grieving, non-technical family member. The 2FA problem alone (phone-tied TOTP, SMS codes) is a genuine unsolved UX challenge. Start there.
landscape (5 existing solutions)
The space is littered with partial solutions: platform-specific legacy tools that only cover one ecosystem, dead man's switches that send emails family might ignore, and digital vaults that store information without acting on it. Nobody has built the 'executor' layer that actually orchestrates account transitions, handles 2FA backup codes, notifies services, and walks a non-technical family member through the process. The recurring HN threads (2018, 2020, 2022, 2023, 2026) prove this need hasn't been met.