Today, we are thrilled to announce the alpha release of PassedBox. In a world where every cloud service wants a piece of your data, we decided to take a step back and bring true ownership back to the user.
Why Local-First?
The cloud is convenient, but it introduces a massive attack surface. Whether it's breaches, bad actors, or policy changes, trusting an external provider with your most confidential files is a risk. PassedBox is fundamentally different. It operates 100% locally. Encryption and decryption happen on your device. Your keys never leave your machine.
The Monero Challenge
We believe in "trust, but verify" - and then verify some more. That's why we invite everyone to inspect our open-source codebase. To make it interesting, we've launched The Vault Challenge. We've published a vault encrypted with PassedBox containing the keys to a Monero wallet holding 1 XMR. If you can break it, you keep it. Period.
What's Next?
This is just the beginning. The desktop application is free forever. To support development, we're launching Premium Mode. For a one-time purchase of $15, you get 1 year of Dead Man's Switch credits — no subscription, no recurring charges. Buy more anytime to extend. Your files never leave your device; only an encrypted key share (generated via Shamir's Secret Sharing) is stored on our server.
The switch has two independent triggers you can enable separately or together:
- Credit Expiration: The share is released when your credits run out. Simply don't buy more to trigger it, or purchase additional credits anytime to keep it held.
- Keep-Alive Check-In: Periodically confirm you're active via calendar reminders or web push notifications. Miss your check-ins and the share is released.
Once released, anyone with the vault file can decrypt it using Share1 + Share3, requiring no password. You can also self-host the Dead Man's Switch server entirely for free.
Download the free app today from our GitHub releases page. Stay secure.