Most business continuity tools stop at telling you when a server has gone dark. VigilVault, a new platform built in the UK, goes a step further with a dead man’s switch designed to hand over the keys to a business if the person holding them can no longer respond.
What the platform calls a “legacy handover” works as a check-in-based safety mechanism. A business owner nominates a trusted person — a co-founder, family member, or adviser — and sets an interval at which they must confirm they are active. If the owner fails to check in within the agreed period, the system gradually releases access to critical credentials stored in an encrypted vault. The handover is cancelled if the owner signs back in, a safeguard that prevents accidental triggering while ensuring the nominated recipient can step in when the worst happens.
The feature is aimed squarely at solo founders and small teams, where a single person often holds every password, API key, software licence and recovery code. Without a plan, that person’s sudden absence — through illness, accident, or worse — can lock a business out of its own systems. VigilVault positions itself as “business continuity in one place”, covering both technical downtime and the human risk of a single point of failure.
Alongside the legacy handover, VigilVault combines three services in a single dashboard. The first is round-the-clock uptime monitoring for websites, APIs and servers, with checks run from multiple geographic regions and tests that include HTTP, keyword, port and ping. Alerts can be sent by email, Slack, Discord or webhooks, and the system is designed to filter out false alarms from momentary blips. The second is the encrypted credential vault itself, which stores passwords, API keys, recovery codes and software licences securely. The third is additional monitoring for SSL certificate and domain expiry, warning the business before either lapses and risks taking the service offline.
VigilVault is run as a trade name of Tecniq Services Ltd, a company registered in England & Wales with its office in Witham, Essex. Tecniq Services Ltd was founded at the start of 2022 and spent three years developing internal systems for its founder’s other businesses before opening its services to external clients towards the end of 2024. The parent company’s broader offering includes automated workflow implementation, system integration, process optimisation, technology consulting, custom PHP development, API connections and integrations with platforms such as Xero, WordPress and ServiceM8.
The platform offers a genuinely useful free tier with no card required: three monitors checked every 30 minutes, storage for ten vault items, and the full set of alerting tools. Paid tiers start at £5 a month (excluding VAT) for 25 monitors checked every five minutes and 100 vault items, rising to £15 for 100 monitors and 500 items, and £49 for 500 monitors and 5,000 items. All tiers include the vault, alerts, and the full monitor toolkit. Higher tiers also include status pages. VigilVault differentiates itself from established competitors such as UptimeRobot, Pingdom and Better Stack by arguing it offers sharper entry pricing and a unique combination of uptime monitoring, credential storage and a dead man’s switch — features none of those rivals provide together.
The concept of a digital dead man’s switch has evolved from mechanical safety devices into sophisticated cloud-based tools that use encryption and multi-factor authentication. Beyond business continuity, similar mechanisms are used for digital estate planning, managing personal assets, and secure communications. Typically the user defines a check-in schedule; if they fail to confirm within a set period, pre-programmed actions — such as releasing vault credentials — are triggered. Some implementations flip the logic: nothing happens until a recipient requests access, and the owner has a window to respond and block it. VigilVault’s design follows the check-in model, with the handover process automatically cancelled when the owner authenticates.
Tom Chubb, the founder of VigilVault and the person behind Tecniq Services Ltd, framed the problem in plain terms: “Two things keep small business owners up at night: their systems failing, and what happens if the one person who holds all the logins isn’t around. We built VigilVault so you don’t have to choose which to worry about.”
