Alive and Breathing (the blog)

Just filed my online paperwork for the LLC formation for Alive and Breathing LLC. I actually have a LLC that I do all my consulting work under but decided that this should be totally separate from that. Texas makes it pretty easy to file for a LLC. For $301 + about 3% in fees along with some basic information and you are ready to roll in about a week.

Billing & Transaction Processing

I am working on the Billing side of Alive and Breathing. The number of payment processors out there is just.. overwhelming. I also need to get a bank account setup for this project as well. I have decided to use Paddle from the start. This is not a low cost payment processor at all, 5% fees and $0.50/transaction but…. they handle all the taxes for you. That is a stress that I do not need from the start so I appreciate that the service can basically take that load off of my back and I can look forward to saving a bit of scratch in the future if this service pans out.

This service has been more than two years in the making and about a full solid year of serious development. I have seen tons of people on Reddit that are now posting self hosted versions of a dead mans switch, and I get the fuzzies when I run into those threads.

Competition & Self Hosting

One of the main things that I usually see in these threads are people concerned that the service will not execute when needed. Self hosting takes skill and technical know how. There are so many avenues for a service to fail. DNS mishaps (expired certificates, bad records), VPS (outages, bad configurations, firewalls, routing issues). I know most of this because these same things are always on my mind as well.

I do not expect Alive and Breathing to be a secondary thought / turn and burn kind of project. This is something I want to make sure is 100% reliable. So much though has been put into monitoring and alerting to make sure that if any part of this fails, someone will be on it.

I feel like this service could possibly determine the life outcome of a fellow human and that is kind of important. I am sure most of the triggers will be used for parents to check on their kids without being super intrusive, more benign than anything else but I know what I am using this service for personally, and it could make a life and death kind of difference for myself, so I have to assume that some percentage of users will also be in that same boat.

I have actually wanted to create this project for a long time — or at least since 2013. The primary reason for creating this service being I am a terrible hiker.

Yup. You read that right. This service was created because of how terrible I am at hiking alone. It is mostly how inept I am at navigation combined with the knack to easily get distracted or lost in thought. I also hated having to let people know that I am out in the wilderness possibly doing sketchy shit. I felt like that was a burden I should not have to unload on anyone.

There have two times when hiking alone where I had actually screwed up so bad, I was honestly thinking it might be my last hike. Twice! You think I would give up hiking alone, but as any avid hiker what it would take for them to give up hiking. Its not going to happen.

Having wanted a service like this for so long has made me realize there were certain things I wanted to enable for the service. I have checked out my competition and I know what I am building has way more features than any of the services offer, and I want to take it even further.

Some of my extras might sound crazy right now but let me cook and try and figure them out. I want to create a service that has a ton of value for everyone, maybe even someone not looking specifically for a dead mans switch but someone that wants to have a “last rights” service so they can share themselves with the world (or just some close friends).

I have been working on this project for over a year now code wise. I am close to pushing out the MVP. This is the first major project I have ever worked on for myself though I have created platforms for other companies in the past. This is probably by far one of the most delicate and technical services I have ever created though.

Going forward, these posts will probably get a bit more technical as I work through the bits of the platform. The goal is to document my journey though which is what I am doing now.