Ask HN: How to keep your side projects going after you die?

Is it "You want to have your next-of-kin benefit from the income stream?" Then rather than doing hard software engineering you should do easy financial engineering and purchase term life insurance on yourself. If you pass away suddenly, your heirs walk away with millions of dollars with zero execution risk and the servers fall over when they fall over.

If you think these projects create lots of value in the world and you'd be sad to see it go away, then this is business continuity planning. The thing you probably want to do is have a will which will entrust a pot of money (c.f. term life insurance, above) to a lawyer with instructions for them to spend some on a technologist to parachute in, prepare the projects for sale, and sell them on.

There is a variant of this where you fund a foundation to run the projects indefinitely but that seems like unlikely to be the best solution given "side project."