The Silent Countdown

When you die, your bank freezes your accounts. Credit cards stop working. Direct debits fail.

AWS doesn't know you're dead. It knows your bill wasn't paid. After 30 days of non-payment, services are suspended. After 90 days, data is deleted.

Your entire SaaS product — customer data, source code deployments, databases — lives on infrastructure paid for by a dead person's credit card.

This isn't a server crash. This isn't a hack. This is a routine billing failure that erases your company.

The Cascade of Cloud Dependency

It's not just AWS. Map your dependency chain:

• Domain registrar (GoDaddy, Cloudflare) — domain expires, website goes offline • Email service (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) — team loses email access • CI/CD (GitHub Actions, CircleCI) — deploys stop • Monitoring (Datadog, PagerDuty) — alerts stop, nobody knows things are breaking • Payment processing (Stripe) — API keys rotate, payments fail

Every month a founder dies, their SaaS has a ticking clock. Most teams don't realize until it's too late — because the person who managed all this infrastructure is the person who's gone.

Give the CTO a Tested Recovery Path

A ZeroLatch delivery can support a broader continuity plan:

  1. Document emergency cloud, billing, domain, email, and DNS access
  2. Prefer delegated emergency roles over sharing root credentials where the provider supports them
  3. Set the recipient to an authorised CTO, co-founder, or recovery lead
  4. Use the account's supported check-in interval and separate safety period
  5. Test the path with non-production credentials and provider runbooks

This is a delayed continuity layer, not a replacement for monitored billing alerts, multiple administrators, provider support contacts, or immediate incident response.