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.

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. The only things that ever touch the network are optional: validating an in-app purchase through the App Store, and opt-in crash reports, which are off by default.

Not yet. Today, Krypsis is deliberately local-only — your vault lives on one device.

Premium Sync, which will sync your vault between your devices through iCloud, is coming later in 2026 as an optional, paid add-on. It will be opt-in and end-to-end encrypted, and it will never be required to use the app. Until it ships, the honest answer is that there’s no sync, and your free encrypted backup is how you move your vault to a new device.

Almost nothing. Krypsis has no accounts, no analytics SDK, and no tracking of any kind. Two things can leave your device, and both are narrow: your App Store purchase transaction ID, used to confirm a purchase, and anonymous crash reports — which are opt-in and off by default.

Your photos, videos, documents, PINs, and encryption keys never leave your device. 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.

Krypsis is an iPhone app today, and that’s where our focus is. We’d like to bring it to iPad and Mac, but we’re not going to put a date on something we haven’t built yet.

When we do, your encrypted backup is designed to be portable, so moving your vault across devices won’t mean starting over. For now, treat Krypsis as an iPhone-first vault.

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.