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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Anonymous Dead Man's Switch

Hey HN, I'm John from Alcazar. We just launched a Dead Man’s Switch that uses anonymous accounts instead of email+password. I'm a fan of Mullvad and their approach to accounts, so I copied it. But instead of 16 digits (53 bits of entropy), we generate 12 random words from the Monero wordlist (128 bits) and derive the account identifier+"password" using libsodium. The app is built on top of our existing Flare code and infrastructure. It uses SvelteKit, Shadcn, Tailwind CSS on the frontend, and FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Celery on the backend. It’s hosted on Hetzner and uses Scaleway for sending…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 4 we have checked on their own sites, 4 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1US

    Author here. This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do. Here's Paul Graham:…

    2022 · stylometry.net · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    In 2021 after getting thoroughly sick of Privnote, i built "Burner Note". Even though i didn't promote it in anyway other than a post here and a post on reddit, it ended up getting about 7000(ish) unique users per month. I kinda let it die about 18 months ago but i've resurrected it with some big upgrades. Most botable the app is now truly end to end encrypted (previously was just server side), and I've added dark mode as well as a few other bells and whistles. Feedback welcomed.

    Jan 2026 · burnernote.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3DD

    Spiele im LiraSpin Casino Deutschland ✅ 1.500 EUR + 250 Freispiele Willkommensbonus, Umsatz 20x ⚡ Wöchentlicher Cashback, VIP, Trustly, Krypto und 6.000+ Spiele. Jetzt beitreten.

    2020 · deadmantracker.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    A free, self-hosted dead man

    2d ago · deathplanswitch.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5DI
  6. 6
    End-to-End Encrypted Dead Man's Switchfree tier, from $3.33/mo▲17

    Secure your digital assets with Cipherwill's Dead Man's Switch. Ensure seamless transfer of critical information to your beneficiaries. Protect your legacy today!

    2024 · cipherwill.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    A self-hosted dead man

    Jan 2026 · lastsignal.app · its alternatives →

  8. 8HM

    I made this as a pair programming exercise with o1-preview. o1 did most of the heavy lifting, through high level prompts, but eventually I needed to diverge from it to get to completion. My initial prompt was: --- I'm making a web app: It's like 4chan, but each thread starts with a gps coordinate. People can only post text and images. I want to build it with flask and sqlalchemy. I want just the backend and data model that supports these threads, anonymous users, and users that can register a permanent username. Write as much of it as you can for me. --- This produced a fully scaffolded…

    2024 · mapchan.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9HA

    Hello HN! Here's my November Startup Sprint project (coded in two days). http://hackerlunch.com It allows you to post your lunch plans and lets other hackers join you. I built this because I often see HN users are interested in meeting each other if they are in the same area. I am not a coder, so this version is very rough. If people use it, I will work with others to build a more polished version. I would love some feedback. What do you think? Is this something you will be using?

    2010 · hackerlunch.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    Dead Man's Switchfree tier, from $1.25/mo▲3

    Your credit card is the heartbeat—no check-ins to forget

    Jun 2026 · entrust-this.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11OM

    Hello! As soon as I saw eieio's https://onemillioncheckboxes.com/, I knew I wanted to try it out using Elixir. The original was created using Python and Redis (later Go and Redis) but this one is using just one Elixir server and HAProxy for SSL termination. It's also using S3 to show the overview page where all the checkboxes are drawn on a 1000x1000 canvas. The whole site is running on a 4 core 8 GB Hetzner VPS so I'm interested to see how it will hold up. This took an embarrassingly long amount of time to complete (the first commit was on July 23) but it was my first real…

    2024 · onemillionandonecheckboxes.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12M2

    ok...even though im a bit sleepy, i would love to get a lot of feedback from people regarding my website...also what are the ways I can protect myself from hackers in this situation?

    2011 · ilov3u.net · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    I watched Mr. Robot, stayed up 72 hours on caffeine, and shipped A Silent PWN, a deliberately vulnerable web app with four chained exploits (SQLi → leaked TLS keys → JWT alg confusion → WebSocket nonce). Grab flags, climb the live scoreboard, and let me know what else you break. Code is hilariously bad by design—feedback welcomed!

    2025 · pwn.asilentpond.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14BA
  15. 15MP

    Hello, my name is Marcin. I code for a living.

    2015 · marcinwyszynski.github.io · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hello. I made this project as an experiment in using key cryptography for user identity in a client server model, and for some future peer to peer projects that I am working on. I am looking for feedback, please let me know what you think. Also, Merry Christmas to HN! :-)

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17GA

    Hi HN, About two months ago, I was inspired by the events that began to unfold in Tunisia, Egypt, and then elsewhere, as everyday people started using the internet to organize revolutions against despots. I was amazed at their courage, using sites like Facebook which forces them to use their real name, or twitter which uses an account that can be easily tracked back to them. I thought that if there was a way they could use a site to communicate with a large audience, anonymously, they might be a bit safer. Graffitly is my attempt at that site. It's my first ruby on rails app, and there is…

    2011 · its alternatives →

  18. 18WW

    Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community

    2016 · its alternatives →

  19. 19AM

    I built this after one too many 3 AM wake-ups due to API outages. Existing solutions felt overpriced and overcomplicated for my small-scale needs. Key features: Simple, GitHub-inspired dashboard Free tier: 5-minute checks, email alerts, 30-day retention Premium tier: 1-minute checks, SMS alerts, unlimited retention Significantly more affordable than enterprise solutions Tech stack: Next.js frontend, Node.js backend, MongoDB, Stripe for payments. This is my attempt to solve the "sleep vs. downtime" dilemma for fellow indie hackers. I'd appreciate any feedback or feature suggestions. What's…

    2024 · martinup.app · its alternatives →

  20. 20MW

    So I got so involved in setting up AdWords, tracking down WP security bloggers, etc. that I forgot to post it here and get you all to check it out and offer suggestions. It's only been out for a couple weeks or so though, so this still qualifies as "launch window", I guess. Check it out here: http://www.panic-press.com/ Promo code "show-hn" for a free month to try it out. It has 100 uses, so it shouldn't run out, but if it does, let me know.

    2012 · panic-press.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21CD

    We've set up DeekSeek R1 with a system prompt that attempts to censor the word PRIVATEKEY from its response. If you can get DeepSeek R1 to output that string (not in the reasoning, but in the final response), the system will reveal a private key which contains $1000 USDC. You will have a 50 token limit in the input. We will have a series of contests, sponsored by AI researchers, in order to learn more about prompt engineering and how LLMs interact with real money. Good luck! Edit: The money was claimed! Thanks for playing all. You can still play for fun. Stay tuned for the next one! Stats:…

    2025 · deepbounty.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22AS

    Hello Hacker News! In the past few weeks I've been working on a side project that allows you to post anonymously a short message and a photo that is tied to your location. Other people can see posts around them in a radius of 1 kilometer. Posts are ephemeral and disappear after one day. That's all. It started as an exercise to try to write a geohash index and to try nodejs and Redis. I'm not sure if/how it could be useful. Maybe it could be used as a quick way of sharing something with someone next to you, or to leave a reminder for someone at a specific location. Or it could be abused…

    2015 · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Anonymous confessions

    2025 · darkmirror.lol · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hello HN, around October last year, I started to work on campaignkit.cc as a side project. It is a service to detect invalid and malicious email addresses. You can upload text files, and use the REST API or direct integration to retrieve a detailed report for each email address. End of March I added Stripe Payments and got my first paying customers via SEM. A coworker suggested starting a Show HN thread, so here we are :) I used golang for the backend since I wanted something lightweight with fast compilation times (coming from scala). For the frontend, I'm using Next.js and TailwindUI. On…

    2022 · campaignkit.cc · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →