A vault on your own phone has no recurring costs

2026-09-20

The market leader in this category charges up to $120 a year. It is worth asking, plainly, what the recurring cost is that a recurring price is covering.

What a subscription normally pays for

Subscriptions make sense when the provider has costs that repeat: servers, storage, bandwidth, a support team, content licensing. Your monthly payment covers your share of a bill that arrives every month whether you use the product or not.

A vault that stores your files on your own phone has none of these. There is no server holding your photos. There is no bandwidth, because nothing is transferred. Storage is the storage you already bought when you bought the phone.

So what is being sold

Three things, usually, and only one of them is honest.

Cloud storage, which is a real cost

If the app uploads your files, the subscription is genuine — you are renting space on somebody else's computer. That is a fair trade, but notice what you bought: your private files now live somewhere you do not control, with a company that can be breached, subpoenaed, or acquired. You are paying monthly for the thing a vault was supposed to prevent.

Continued access to your own files

Some apps limit how many items you can keep unless you pay, then keep charging to maintain access. Your files are on your device, encrypted by an app that will not open them until the payment clears. This is a business model, not a cost.

Development, framed as rent

Ongoing development is a real expense and developers deserve to be paid. But that is an argument for charging for major versions, not for metering access to files that are sitting on hardware you own.

The arithmetic over three years

The incentive problem

This is the part that matters more than the money. A subscription has to be renewed, which means the product has to make leaving expensive.

That pressure shows up as awkward exports, files that are easy to put in and hard to get out, a free tier small enough to be useless, and engagement features nobody asked for. None of those are conspiracies; they are what happens when the business model rewards retention over usefulness.

A one-time purchase has the opposite failure mode, and it is only fair to say so: once you have paid, there is no revenue from keeping you happy. Our answer is that the same constraint that removes the servers also removes most of the ongoing cost, so there is less to sustain. That is an argument you are entitled to weigh rather than accept.

Applying this to ourselves

We sell a subscription now, so this argument had better survive being pointed back at us.

The vault is still bought once, and it always will be. It stores your files on hardware you already own, it costs us nothing to run, and metering access to it would be the exact behaviour described three sections up. Nothing about that changes when you stop paying us, because there is nothing to stop paying.

What we do charge monthly for is sync: carrying encrypted copies of your vault between your own devices. That is the first thing this product has ever done that has a bill attached — servers, storage, bandwidth, every month, whether you use it that month or not. By the test in this article, that is the honest kind of subscription: you are renting something that genuinely costs money to provide, and the moment you stop, the vault on your phone keeps working exactly as it did.

It also cost us something to build. The app used to ship with no internet permission at all, which meant Android itself enforced the promise that nothing was uploaded. Sync needs a network, so that enforcement is gone and what replaces it is a narrower claim we have to keep ourselves: the server is told your email address and nothing else. We think that is worth saying out loud rather than leaving for somebody to discover in a teardown.

The test

Next time a local-storage app asks for a monthly payment, ask what bill it covers. If the answer is cloud storage, decide whether you wanted cloud storage. If there is no answer, you have learned something about the product.

Ask us the same question. The answer is "sync, and nothing else" — and if you never turn sync on, the answer is that we are not asking.