A cooperative vault for the photos that matter.

Photovault isn’t a per-user subscription. You start a vault for your family, team, or community, you all share it, and you split the bill — which is just S3 Glacier storage plus a small markup. The more of you on a vault, the cheaper per person.

Two keys to open. Two extra for emergencies.

Each member gets a personal Shamir share when they join. To unseal the vault you need two shares present at the same time — so opening it is always a team act, never a solo move. Day to day you each remember a passphrase; if you forget it, an email-delivered one-time token lets you extract it once per day. Too many bad attempts in a row and the vault seals itself.

Hand two extra unseal shares to people outside your team — a lawyer, a trusted friend, an estate executor. If the whole team is gone, any two of them together can open the vault and recover the photos.

Zero-knowledge by design.

• Encryption keys live in OpenBao behind the Shamir seal — the server cannot read your photos.
• Every photo is encrypted client-side before upload. Originals and thumbnails both ship as ciphertext to S3.
• Storage is S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval: ~$0.004/GB/mo, browsable in milliseconds, cheap enough that a 50 GB family archive costs cents per month split four ways.
• The desktop scanner backs up from macOS Photos, iCloud, Google Photos (Takeout or live Picker), a Hetzner Storage Box, or any folder.