Comparing dead man’s switch services: the four shapes

Search for a dead man’s switch and you will find a dozen listicles ranking eight products against each other as though they were competing brands of the same thing. They are not. There are four genuinely different kinds of product wearing the same label, and the reason those comparisons feel useless is that they are comparing a free Google setting with a blockchain key splitter and a monthly safety check in call.

This article sorts the category into its actual shapes, says plainly which one suits which problem, and tells you where we sit. We make one of these products, so treat our verdict on ourselves accordingly. Prices and features are as we found them in September 2026 and this is exactly the sort of thing that changes without warning — check before you buy.

Shape 1: the platform legacy tools

Examples: Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Apple’s Legacy Contact, Facebook’s legacy contact.

These are free settings inside an account you already have. Google’s watches for inactivity — 3, 6, 12 or 18 months — then emails up to ten people a link to download the data you chose. Apple’s works differently: you generate an access key for your legacy contact now, and after your death they present that key plus a death certificate to get at your photos, messages, notes and backups. Neither hands over a password, and Apple explicitly excludes your iCloud Keychain, so passwords and passkeys stay locked.

What they are best at: the account they live in, and nothing else. They are free, they will outlive the company you were about to pay, and in most of the United States a provider’s own legacy tool legally outranks your will under the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act. Google’s is also the only tool that can close the Google account down afterwards.

What they cannot do: anything outside their own walls, anything on a timer shorter than months, or anything that looks like a letter rather than a data export.

Verdict: not optional. Set these up whatever else you do. We wrote a longer piece on where Google’s tool stops.

Shape 2: the scheduled message senders

Example: Dead Man’s Switch (deadmansswitch.net), and a long tail of similar small tools.

The original shape, and still the cheapest. You write emails, you set a check in interval, and if you stop checking in the emails go out. The free tier at deadmansswitch.net lets you send one message to your own address as a test on a two day interval; the paid tier runs about two dollars a month billed yearly, covers a hundred messages to a hundred recipients, and allows 10MB of attachments.

What they are best at: messages. If what you want to deliver is words — a letter, an explanation, instructions, a goodbye — this shape does it well and cheaply, and the simplicity is a genuine feature. Fewer moving parts is fewer things to break in ten years.

What to watch: attachment ceilings, and what is actually encrypted. A tool that stores your message as ordinary database text is fine for a letter to your brother and wrong for a list of account recovery codes. Ask, and be suspicious of an answer that is a marketing adjective rather than a cipher name.

Verdict: if your plan is one letter and no files, this shape is enough and you should not pay more.

Shape 3: the encrypted inheritance vaults

Examples: Cipherwill, DGLegacy, AbsentKey, Inheriti and others.

These are credential-first. You put passwords, recovery phrases, crypto keys and documents into an encrypted vault, name beneficiaries, and a trigger — inactivity, a beneficiary’s request, a verification process — releases them. Cipherwill, as an example, has a free tier with five beneficiaries and email alerts, and a premium plan at $40 a year that adds 1GB of encrypted file storage and phone, SMS and WhatsApp fallbacks. Several in this group use genuine end to end encryption, and one or two split the key across a blockchain.

What they are best at: secrets, especially crypto. If the thing you are worried about is a seed phrase, this is the category built for it, and the end to end encryption is real rather than decorative.

What to watch: the moment of collection. Real end to end encryption means the service cannot decrypt for you, which means your beneficiary has to do something — install something, hold a key, complete a verification, understand a process. That is a fair trade for a seed phrase. It is a bad trade for a letter to a seventy year old who has just lost you. Ask yourself honestly whether the person on the other end will get through it unaided.

Verdict: the right shape if the payload is secrets and the recipient is technical.

Shape 4: the estate platforms

Examples: Everplans and the wider digital estate planning category, plus the check in safety services like Snug that sit next to them.

These are organisers rather than switches. They give you a structured place for documents, policies, accounts and wishes, and a way for a deputy to reach it. Some add professional advisers. The safety check in tools are a separate thing again: a daily check in that alerts an emergency contact if you miss it, with no secrets and no files involved at all.

What they are best at: breadth and structure, for someone who wants to do the whole job properly and does not want to think about timers.

What to watch: most of them are not switches. Delivery depends on a human knowing to go and look. If nobody knows the account exists, nothing happens.

The six things that actually differ

Once you know which shape you want, these are the questions that separate products inside it. We have answered each for ourselves so you can see the shape of an honest answer.

1. What triggers it, and how easy is it to trigger by accident

Inactivity measured by the platform, inactivity measured by an explicit check in, a beneficiary’s request, or a fixed date. The failure mode of the first is that your devices keep the account alive after you are gone. The failure mode of the second is that you forget. The failure mode of the third is that it never fires at all.

Us: an explicit check in, per vault, on any interval from hours to years, or a fixed date. Reminders at 75 and 90 percent of the window, and the reminder email carries a one tap check in link so it takes a thumb rather than a login.

2. What the recipient has to do

The single most under-asked question in this category. Work out, specifically, what the person receiving your material will have to do, and then picture them doing it in the week after a funeral.

Us: read an email. Files small enough to send are attached; larger ones are a download link they open by confirming the address the message was sent to. No account, no app, no key.

3. Where encryption starts and stops

Any service that can email a decrypted attachment to a recipient with no account and no key must be able to decrypt on your behalf. Zero knowledge and automatic email delivery are mutually exclusive. A service claiming both has not thought it through or is hoping you have not.

Us: AES-256-GCM at rest, per file keys that are themselves encrypted, decryption on our server at the moment of download or delivery. That is not zero knowledge and we will not call it that. See how your files are encrypted.

4. What happens to files that are too big to email

Every provider hits the same wall at roughly ten megabytes, because that is what mail servers accept. What differs is the answer. Some cap uploads. Some silently drop the largest files from the delivery. Some hand over a link.

Us: up to about 9MB is attached to the message; anything larger is delivered as a private per-recipient download link in the same email, good for 90 days, opened by confirming the address. See attaching files to a vault.

5. What happens if the business stops

A switch is a promise about a date that may be decades out, made by a company that might not last five years. There is no guarantee anyone can honestly give you here. What you can ask for is an export path and a straight answer.

Us: your files are downloadable at any time, your message is yours to copy, and we would rather you kept a paper backup of the essentials than relied on us alone. That is also why the platform legacy tools above are first on this page rather than last.

6. What happens if you stop paying

Ask before you subscribe. A service that deletes on the day a card expires is a service that can lose your plan because a bank reissued a number.

Us: a cancelled subscription runs to the end of the period you paid for and then drops to the free plan. Vaults beyond the free limit are paused, not deleted. See what happens when your plan drops.

Where we sit, and what we are not

My Signal Vault is shape two with shape three’s storage: a message-first switch that can carry real files. Encrypted uploads, an explicit check in on your own interval, a formatted delivery email that needs nothing from the recipient, download links for anything too large to attach, per-vault timers, and a full audit log.

What we are not:

• Not zero knowledge. See above. If mathematical secrecy from the operator is your requirement, shape three is where to look, and accept what it asks of your recipient.
• Not a will. Nothing here has legal force over your estate. It sits alongside a will, it does not replace one — we wrote about how that division of labour actually works.
• Not a crypto inheritance product. You can put a seed phrase in a vault and people do. But the specialists in shape three have built their entire threat model around that one job and we have not.
• Not free forever at scale. There is a free plan with no card, and it is deliberately usable rather than a trial. Beyond one vault and a little storage, it costs money.

How to choose in five minutes

1. Set up the platform tools first. They are free and they outrank everything else. Twenty minutes, once.
2. Write down what you are actually delivering. A letter? Credentials? A 4GB folder of photographs? The payload picks the shape.
3. Name the recipient and be honest about them. Technical or not? This decides whether end to end encryption is a feature or a wall.
4. Pick the shortest timer you will genuinely keep. Most accidental deliveries are a timer set by an optimist.
5. Test it before you rely on it. Any service worth paying should let you see the delivery yourself. If it will not, that tells you something.

If you want the long form version of the interrogation, we published nine questions to ask any provider, our own answers included. And if you would rather just look at one, the free plan needs no card and the help centre is written to be read before you sign up rather than after.