Imagine your check-ins stop. What happens next?
Stage one: You get reminders. During the grace period — the amount of time defined by your plan — Agathon sends you notifications. This is deliberate. A missed check-in could mean anything. A lost phone. A hospital stay. A week buried in work. The system assumes you're probably fine and gives you every chance to check back in.
Stage two: Your release policy activates. If you remain unreachable after the grace period, Agathon follows your predetermined plan. On the Personal and Professional tiers, this can be multi-stage: notify your spouse first, then three days later notify your business partner, then five days later notify your executor. This gives you control over the pace and scope of disclosure. Not everything goes out at once. You decide the sequence.
Stage three: Human review for anything public. This is the safeguard that matters most. If your plan includes releasing documents to social media, a public forum, or any channel where strangers might see them, that release doesn't happen automatically. It's queued for a human review by our trust & safety team. This step exists because automated systems can fail. A false positive (someone in a coma who recovers, a traveler in an area without connectivity for six weeks) shouldn't result in an irreversible public disclosure.
The combination of reminders + staged escalation + mandatory human review is what turns a dead man's switch from a blunt instrument into something genuinely trustworthy. It says:
"We'll automate the mechanical parts. We'll let you design the sequence. But for anything irreversible, a human being reviews it first."