Pricing

Photovault doesn’t charge per seat. You pay for what you actually consume — storage and AI tokens — and the same amount however many of you share the vault.

Storage

Encrypted photo blobs sit in S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval: AWS’s cheapest tier that’s still browsable in milliseconds.

AWS price: $0.004/GB/month
Photovault markup: +20%
You pay: $0.0048/GB/month

A 50 GB family archive: about $0.24/month. Split four ways, $0.06 each. PGP-encrypted ciphertext only — AWS sees nothing plaintext.

AI / Claude tokens

Optional intelligence features (auto-tagging, deduplication suggestions, face clustering) bill through the Anthropic API.

Anthropic prices: as published, per model.
Photovault markup: +20%

Pure backup doesn’t use any. You can leave AI off entirely and your bill is just storage.

What you don’t pay for

No per-user / per-seat fees.
No minimum monthly.
No upload bandwidth charge — encrypted upload over plain HTTPS.
No download bandwidth markup — you pay only AWS’s egress (~$0.09/GB if you bulk-download via the gallery zip).

The key model — why “cooperative” matters

A Photovault is a shared safe. You start one, you invite members, and each member becomes a co-owner of the same vault.

Each member gets a Shamir unseal share when they join.
Opening the vault always takes two shares, so it’s never a solo act — at least one teammate has to be present.
Day-to-day access uses each member’s memorised passphrase. If you forget it, an email-delivered one-time token lets you extract it once per day.
Too many bad passphrase attempts in a row and the vault seals itself; a teammate’s share is required to reopen.
You can hand two extra unseal shares to outside trustees — a lawyer, an estate executor, a long-time friend. If the entire team is gone, two of those trustees together can open the vault and recover the photos.

Encryption keys live in OpenBao behind the Shamir seal. Photovault.traeck.it operators cannot read your photos. Even if the server is compromised, the OpenBao stays sealed and the ciphertext on S3 is useless to an attacker.

The cooperative model is the product direction. Today the codebase still runs the legacy single-user PGP flow described on signup; the OpenBao + Shamir + team-vault architecture is the next major build. Existing accounts will migrate seamlessly.