Everything you use, somebody else can withdraw.

The vendor, when they retire a model on a blog post's notice. Their trust and safety team, who can suspend an account without naming the rule. And the card on file, on the day the renewal quietly declines.

The saved projects and the custom instructions. Whatever memory it built about how you work. And the thing people forget: the behaviour you tuned your prompts against — the successor model is not the same model.

Hosting Open-Source Models and Production Agent Engineering get you to run an open model locally and to configure an open model endpoint behind a provider interface — one client script, unedited, working against both. Using Large Language Models and Control AI Spending make the swap a decision rather than a panic.

The provider, by suspension or by shutting the free tier. A legal process, which arrives at them and not at you. A lapsed payment, which is the most common version and the least dramatic.

Every password reset in your life routes through this box. Losing it loses the accounts that reset into it — including the ones you have forgotten you own, which is exactly the set you cannot enumerate under pressure.

Digital Identity Defense makes you configure recovery that survives losing the device and then falsify your own account recovery by attempting it — you attack your own recovery and log how far you got. Keep It Running turns the result into a written inventory.

The vendor: a lapsed subscription that drops you to read-only, a breach that forces a rotation you now have to do by hand, an acquisition that changes what the free tier means.

Every credential at once, and the second factors if you kept them in the same vault. This is the one you cannot afford to be locked out of, which is precisely why you export it on a day when nothing is wrong.

Digital Identity Defense and Consumer Device Rescue and Defense cover configure recovery that survives losing the device; Intro to Open Source Software covers migrate your work off a subscription without losing it — the export opening in the replacement, plus the cancellation confirmation.

The provider. Or a classifier that locks the whole account over one file, with an appeal form as the only door back in and no human at the other end of it for weeks.

The archive, and every share link somebody else's work points at. A backup you can only restore through their client is not a backup — it is a tenancy with a good uptime record.

Solarpunk Automation and Build a Cyberdeck teach repurpose a retired device into a working server and operate a single board computer as an always on service — proved by the service coming back after an unplanned restart. Keep It Running decides whether that is actually the better trade.

One moderator on a bad afternoon. A policy rewrite. An acquisition that changes what the feed rewards. A government that blocks the app in a country where a third of your people live.

The audience list. You can export your posts; you cannot export the people. The reach is not a thing you own and quietly never was — it is a permission that has so far kept being renewed.

Practical Propaganda makes you classify your channels by what removes them — the actor who can remove each channel, and the fallback tested at least once. Then design a channel that reaches people who are not looking for you. Founding Federation: Smallest Sellable Thing builds the list you actually hold.

The host and their policy team. A failed card is an outage; a terms change is an eviction. Both run on their timetable, and the notice period is whatever they decided it was.

Everything the box serves, plus the DNS if you left it there, plus the state that only exists on that disk because the backup script has been failing silently since the last upgrade.

Keep It Running is the one that matters here: justify a hosting choice by cost per outcome and verify you would know your system broke before a user tells you — a real failure you heard about from your own alerting, with timestamps.

The carrier, over an unpaid bill or a botched port. Or a stranger who convinces a shop assistant they are you — which is not a hack, it is a customer service process working as designed.

The SMS second factor, and therefore every account still falling back to SMS. The number is also the identifier half your contacts have for you, so the loss is social before it is technical.

Digital Identity Defense: SMS removed as a recovery method, codes printed and stored off any device. Scam and Fraud Home Defense adds operate a callback rule against incoming contact — a household code phrase and one real call you broke off. Field Opsec drills it.

The service, by repricing the storage tier you are quietly over. Or a classifier that misreads one picture of your own child and locks the account, which has happened to people with no recourse at all.

Not only the files. The faces, the dates, the albums, the ordering — the index is what made ten years usable, and it is theirs. A folder of exported JPEGs is the archive with the finding aid burned.

Solarpunk Automation gives you somewhere of your own to put it; Keep It Running makes you characterise what a tool costs you beyond its price — costed on all four axes, with the exit path named and the price of taking it.

One small company, which is a lovely thing to buy from and a precarious thing to depend on. Or the acquirer, who has no reason to keep maintaining a client for a file format nobody else reads.

The writing, and worse, the links between it. A discontinued product takes the structure unless you can read the files without the program that wrote them.

Intro to Open Source Software starts at locate an open source replacement for software you pay for — with the gap you would have to live with written down, not glossed — and ends at migrate your work off a subscription without losing it.

The registrar, the registry above them, a dispute process, or an expiry notice sent to an address you stopped reading in 2021. Nobody owns a domain. Everybody rents one in ten-year increments.

Your email addresses, and every link anyone ever saved or printed or cited. This is the dependency most likely to be the one the assessment calls the one you cannot replace.

Keep It Running is where you produce an account of what you depend on and who can revoke it, which is the whole philosophy in one artefact. Digital Identity Defense makes sure the renewal notice reaches a mailbox you still read.

The ISP, the power company, a storm, and — in a growing number of places — a state that can order the whole thing off for a week. This one takes everything above it at the same time.

Every remote dependency at once, and your group's ability to coordinate about the fact that they are gone. The outage and the loss of the channel you would use to discuss the outage are the same event.

Solarpunk Automation teaches operate a mesh network that carries messages without infrastructure and configure a node to run on power you generate, measured in hops and in hours unplugged. Keep It Running adds characterise what breaks when you cut the connection — predict first, then pull the plug and read the gap.