Questions, answered honestly

If you forget your PIN and don’t have a backup, your vault is gone — and we genuinely cannot recover it. There’s no master key, no recovery email, and no support team that can let you back in. Your PIN is what derives your encryption key, and we never store it.

That’s exactly why Krypsis can promise that no one else can read your photos. The flip side is that the responsibility sits with you. Keep a backup — it’s free on every tier — and if you’re worried about forgetting, store your PIN somewhere you trust, like a password manager.

Yes, and it’s free on every tier. Krypsis exports your entire vault to a single encrypted .vaultbak file that only you can open. You control where it goes — save it to Files, an external drive, or your own cloud storage. Krypsis never uploads it anywhere for you.

To restore, open the file in Krypsis on any device and unlock it with your PIN. Because the backup is encrypted with your key, a copy sitting in iCloud Drive or on a USB stick is still unreadable without that PIN. We recommend making a backup soon after you start using the app.

If you use iCloud Sync, keep making backups anyway. Sync is a second live copy, not a backup — delete something on one device and it disappears from the others too. A .vaultbak file is a snapshot that nothing can reach back and change.

The iOS Photos hidden folder just moves photos into a separate album. The images are still stored unencrypted in your Photos library, still synced to iCloud Photos if you have it switched on, and still visible to anything with access to your library.

Krypsis is different. Your photos are encrypted with a key derived from your PIN and stored outside the Photos library entirely. They aren’t in iCloud Photos, they don’t appear in the system Photos app, and they can’t be read without your PIN — not by another app, not by us, and not by someone holding your unlocked phone who doesn’t know it.

Completely. Krypsis does everything on your device — capture, encryption, decryption, albums, and backups — with no network connection required. There’s no server doing the work, because there’s no server.

You can put your phone in airplane mode and the app behaves exactly the same. Only two things ever touch the network, and both are things you choose: validating an in-app purchase through the App Store, and iCloud Sync, if you’ve switched it on. With sync off — the default — Krypsis never connects to anything.

Sync is built in, opt-in, and off until you switch it on in Settings. Once it’s on, your photos, videos, documents and albums stay in step across your own devices.

What makes it different from ordinary cloud storage is where the data goes and what it looks like when it gets there. It goes to your own iCloud account, not to our servers — we don’t run any. Files are uploaded exactly as they’re already stored on your device: encrypted. Filenames, album names and dates are encrypted inside each record too, so Apple holds nothing but ciphertext and can’t read it. Neither can we.

A copy of your vault key, still locked by your PIN, travels via iCloud Keychain so a second device can join. You enter your PIN there once. Your PIN itself is never transmitted or stored anywhere.

Two things worth knowing: your decoy vault never syncs under any circumstances, and sync is not a backup — it’s a second live copy. Keep making .vaultbak backups.

iCloud Sync is included with Lifetime, or available on its own as a Premium Sync subscription.

Almost nothing, and nothing in the background. Krypsis has no accounts, no analytics SDK, and no crash-reporting SDK — there’s nothing to switch off, because there’s nothing there.

Two things can leave your device, and only when you ask for them. Your App Store purchase transaction ID, so the app knows what you bought. And, if you turn on iCloud Sync, your already-encrypted vault content — which goes to your own iCloud account rather than to us.

Your PINs and encryption keys never leave your device in usable form. Your photos, videos and documents never leave it unencrypted. The full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

Not at launch — and we won’t claim otherwise. We plan to open-source the cryptographic core after launch so anyone can inspect how the encryption works, but today the app you install is a closed binary.

We’d rather tell you plainly that it isn’t open source yet than imply a transparency we haven’t delivered. The Security page describes exactly what the code does, and the roadmap is real, not marketing.

A Lifetime purchase is tied to your Apple Account, and whether it can be shared depends on Apple’s Family Sharing rules for the app at the time you buy.

Your vault itself is never shared. It’s encrypted on your device with your PIN, and Family Sharing has no way to see inside it. If you want the app on a family member’s device with its own separate vault, they can install Krypsis, start on the free tier, and decide for themselves whether to buy Lifetime.

iPad, yes. Krypsis is a universal iOS app with a layout built for the larger screen — a sidebar instead of a tab bar, wider grids, and full-width viewing. If you turn on iCloud Sync, the same vault appears on both your iPhone and your iPad.

Mac, not yet. We’d like to get there, but we’re not going to put a date on something we haven’t built.

Either way your encrypted backup is portable, so moving a vault between devices never means starting over.

All purchases go through the App Store, so all refunds are handled by Apple, not by us — we never see your payment details. If you’d like a refund, request it through Apple’s standard process at reportaproblem.apple.com.

EU and UK consumers also have a 14-day right of withdrawal, exercised via Apple. Our Terms of Service cover the details.

Because someone has to pay for the software, and we’d rather it be you, once, than advertisers forever. Krypsis has no ads, no tracking, and nothing to sell about you — which means the only sustainable way to fund it is for the people who use it to pay for it.

The free tier is genuinely useful, and Lifetime is a single payment, not a subscription. We think that’s the most honest deal: you pay for the app, and the app works for you.

Fair question — you shouldn’t just take our word for it. Three things help.

First, the Security page describes exactly what we encrypt, how, and what we can’t do, in enough detail for a technical reader to check. Second, the architecture itself is the guarantee: because your key comes from a PIN we never store, we couldn’t read your photos even if we wanted to, or were compelled to. Third, we plan to open-source the cryptographic core after launch so the claims can be inspected directly.

Until then, we’ve tried to make every promise on this site one you can verify, not just believe.