Get started

How it works

Five stages between an ordinary quiet week and a handover.

Every one of them is reversible by you, and every one of them is reversible by any single person you named, without them having to justify it. Silence on its own never releases anything.

The five stages

  1. 01

    Active

    You checked in recently, so nothing is happening and nobody has been contacted. Checking in is one button, and you set how often it is expected — a fortnight suits most people. It is the only thing that has to keep happening.

  2. 02

    Overdue

    You missed one. This is where nearly every false alarm lives — a holiday, a hospital stay, a phone in a river — so the only thing that happens is that you are chased, for as long as you set. Nobody you named is told. No client is told. Nobody but you knows the clock has started.

  3. 03

    Being confirmed

    The grace period ran out, so the people you named are asked a single question: is this person still able to work? They are not asked for evidence, a death certificate or a judgement call. If they say you are fine — you are in hospital, you are abroad, they spoke to you yesterday — the whole thing resets and no harm is done. Your clients still know nothing.

    Confirming the other answer asks them something only they would know, which you recorded when you named them — their date of birth, their mobile number. A link in an email is not a person: mail gets forwarded, inboxes get shared, and security software follows every link before a human sees it. Saying you are fine needs no answer at all, because that direction is always safe.

    And if nobody answers at all, this does not stall here forever. After a further wait that you set, silence from everybody — you included — carries it forward on its own. That matters more than the dramatic version: the likely failure is not everyone dying together, it is an unexpected email about a death being binned or spam-filtered by somebody who meant to deal with it later.

  4. 04

    About to release

    Everybody you named has confirmed, and a final waiting period is running — you decide how long. Signing in and checking in during that window cancels the release outright, and so does any one of them changing their mind. This is the stage that makes a wrong answer survivable.

  5. 05

    Released

    Each of your clients can open a document about their own website: what it is built on, what they already control, what will stop working now the bills have stopped, and what to do about each of those in the order that matters. They see theirs and nobody else's, and none of them learns that the others exist.

The pack

Not one big vault. One plain document per client.

A pack is written for someone who has just been told their web person has died, has no technical background, and needs to know what to do this week. It is ordered by consequence rather than by stack layer: what loses data first, then what goes offline, then what they already control and can stop worrying about.

There are no passwords in it, because moving to another agency does not need any. Their site is on Duda? They ring Duda and ask for a transfer. It runs from a private repo on a host you pay for? Any developer can redeploy it and re-point the domain they already own.

Sorted by what strands a business

Anything that stops working, that you were paying for, and that the client cannot fix themselves goes to the top. Anything already in their name drops to the bottom with a note saying so.

The bit nobody writes down

What the site actually does for them, in their words — "takes quote enquiries, about thirty a month, it's where most of the work comes from". That one line is what turns a list of services into something a stranger can act on.

Useful on paper

Every pack prints. If Torchpass disappeared tomorrow, a printed pack is exactly as useful as it was the day before — which is a deliberately unglamorous answer to "what if you go under".

Read it yourself

A plan nobody has ever read is a story, not a plan.

You can open any client's pack, exactly as they would see it, at any time. Not a summary of it, not an approximation — the same page, rendered by the same code. A preview that could differ from the real thing would be worse than no preview, because reading it is the entire point.

Doing that once is what catches the real failures: the project you never filled in, the client with no email address on file, the service you had forgotten was in your name and not theirs. All of those are fixable while you are here. None of them are fixable afterwards.

See the plans

Fifteen minutes now.
Clarity forever.

Your first client takes about as long as writing the email you would have sent them anyway.

See the plans