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.

If you're sticking with recurring, you'll still need to keep the data for some time after the payments stop. The PR will be disastrous for you if someone passed away, and therefore the payments stop, and then all of their data is lost (worse: now imagine consequential financial loss from the loss of their data). I don't know whether you could be held liable for that or not.

Coincidentally just addressed that here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21344759

That is correct, and yeah I see what you're saying. For example if both me and my wife were to pass away I don't know who would be able to access our things.

> 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.

I just set my wife's email as the recovery address for my Gmail, figuring she can reset most of the important stuff from there.

But that's only a solution for "get into my accounts when I'm dead", not "share access to these things right now", and doesn't have the added benefit of a relatively secure password manager. And it ties you to Google, which may not be the wisest decision (but of course you could do something similar with a different service).

One potential benefit of something like a Passbox is that the important accounts would be ideally listed out vs having to guess what they are then reset the password via your gmail etc.

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.

> 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...

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.