4 ms·

Hi all, original poster here. I created Passbox after buying my first motorcycle and thinking that if anything happened to me on it I'd like for my devices/acc

• cloudking 7y ago
  Cool idea but your pricing structure seems high. You should consider a one-time lifetime fee, it aligns with your business model.
  • mrdazm 7y ago
    Thank you for checking it out and for your feedback! An initial thought I had was to look at it as being akin to an insurance policy of sorts and that's what sort of led me down the recurring revenue path. Definitely will consider one-time fees for the future! Thanks again!
    • jaysh 7y ago
      Those types of insurance polices payout on an event, so a monthly premium makes sense as nobody can afford to pay it upfront. I'd say your service is the internet version of someone creating their will, and leaving it with a friend or family member, which are all one-off costs.
      • mrdazm 7y ago
        Definitely. It'll be interesting for me to balance my recurring costs while matching with consumer ideals. To be continued...
  • giancarlostoro 7y ago
    I would suggest a mix of both. The issue with lifetime fees is eventually someone will start to cost you money. I had a friend who sold some lifetime subscriptions to a VPN service, it's just not entirely feasible. On the other hand, this is what I use BitWarden for, so my wife has access to important accounts and vice-versa. BitWarden does provide free shared passwords for 2 users.
    • jaysh 7y ago
      I don't think that's a fair comparison. VPN services have significant ongoing technical costs: bandwidth, servers, labour (upgrades, support, security, incident resolution) etc which you must pay monthly but are never recovered when charging a one-off price. If you're finding that the users you're sharing your passbox with are requesting your passwords every day, that's probably signal enough to remove them so they automatically use the service less. I'd expect the lifetime marginal cost of an additional user here to be a very small percentage of the revenue for that client.
      • mrdazm 7y ago
        > If you're finding that the users you're sharing your passbox with are requesting your passwords every day This is an interesting scenario I've thought about. Thanks for sharing! It could be the case that once the "death trigger" happens there's a countdown for the requesting user to download the data and then I (Passbox) locks everything down or deletes the original data or something. To be determined...
    • fennecfoxen 7y ago
      Given cloud pricing structures and some basic actuarial tables, it shouldn't be too hard to put a reasonable limit on your resource costs. The real question is whether the cloud will last, or if you'll need to migrate everything off of AWS and onto something incompatible some time in the next 40 years.
    • mrdazm 7y ago
      And with lifetime pricing I don't like the idea of just keeping that money if someone churns. Maybe I'm just not enough of a hardened business person haha. In your case with Bitwarden you're sharing access to your credentials and such with your wife right now, today, right? With Passbox I'm looking to defer that access for data that makes sense. In my case I'm currently single and no one else has access to my iPhone but if I passed then maybe my mom or best friend should have that - as a hypothetical.
      • jaysh 7y ago
  • epanchin 7y ago
    I would be nervous with the one time fee the developer would give up on maintenance before I kicked the bucket. A monthly fee seems reassuring.
    • exhilaration 7y ago
      But what happens when your credit cards are cancelled after you die? That's a Catch-22 right there.
      • mrdazm 7y ago
        I've thought about this. Not a final decision per se (and I haven't coded anything for the scenario) but I imagine I'd maybe have the third party accessing the data pay (up to a cap) to reconcile the account to make it "current" before giving them access - something like that. It avoids folks signing up, canceling the card and then riding for free.
        • dageshi 7y ago
          My 2cents, ditch the monthly plan, price it yearly instead. Monthly plans are for things you will actually use day to day like netflix, yearly are more like "insurance" products which is what this is, I think displaying the yearly option will be a better value proposition for people looking at it. Second, I don't know what payment you're using, but seriously consider paypal if you're not already, because I'm pretty sure you can setup yearly recurring "subscriptions" on paypal and people are much more likely to keep their paypal funding sources up to date. So you're not going to have to nag them to update credit card info every couple years and they're less likely to have occasion to think "do I really want to pay for this", it'll just be pay automatically.
          • giancarlostoro 7y ago
            This also moves the point of cancellation to once a year and not monthly, or one month after.
          • 7y ago
• bristleworm 7y ago
  Hi. While I like the general idea, I do have mixed feelings storing so much valuable data online, on servers of a company I don't know, that operates in the US.
  • mrdazm 7y ago
    Thanks for checking it out! Do your feelings change at all with knowing that the data is completely encrypted at rest and inaccessible by me/the company even though I have access to the database?
    • bshep 7y ago
      What prevents a 3letter agency from instructing you to: 1- give access to one of you trusted contact accounts 2- disable sending notifications to the account holders email 3- 3letter agency clicks on request data 4- data gets released ( as it will not get denied if the account holder does not receive a notification)
      • mrdazm 7y ago
        Thanks for this! 1 - Even with access to the trusted contact's account a passphrase/access key (specific to the main account and not stored by the service) is required 2 - Interesting scenario but still requires the above-mentioned access key 3 - Same as above two points even after being approved 4 - Won't get released without the key
        • luckylion 7y ago
          > 1 - Even with access to the trusted contact's account a passphrase/access key (specific to the main account and not stored by the service) is required I understand that your service is encrypting the data before saving it (vs that happening completely on the client and only encrypted data being sent to you), so there's nothing stopping you from logging it to a plain text file (even accidentally). Given that these passwords will likely hold the keys to that person's identity, that's a huge amount of trust that they need to have in you, your technical abilities and future decisions.
• snowwrestler 7y ago
  How do I know you're still going to be in business when I die?
  • mrdazm 7y ago
    If this actually goes anywhere I personally wouldn't shut the company down silently. I'd have contact information for everyone involved to help them prep for its sunsetting.
    • madamelic 7y ago
      What happens if you die in a server-related explosion? That's a pretty easy way to shut down this service with no notice. Absurdist, sure. But that is the stakes with this kind of service.
• mpnordland 7y ago
  Your feature list for Freemium includes both "Fixed 1-Day Access Wait Period" and "Set Your Own Access Wait Period."
  • mrdazm 7y ago
    I have _no_ idea what you're talking about. :) (Read: Thanks a ton!)
• antjanus 7y ago
  Hey! One of my best friends died in a motorcycle accident -- he was a developer as well (got me in the field!). After his passing, no one knew how to get on his server and/or his domain registrar's account so as a result, someone else snatched up his personal site as soon as it expired, and pretended to be him for several years. I really love hearing about projects like yours cause I'd definitely want to avoid stuff like that!
  • mrdazm 7y ago
    Wow. This hits way too close to home. Thanks for sharing!