# vault1984 — Vision Statement

*"If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself."*
— George Orwell

We built a password manager that takes that literally.

---

## What we built

A password manager where the operator cannot read your vault. Not policy. Not a promise. Architecture. The server holds your data and nothing else. Steal the database. You get ciphertext.

Your AI agents authenticate against it, retrieve credentials, and operate autonomously. Nobody else sees inside. Not us, not anyone with a subpoena, not a breach.

We open-sourced it. You don't have to trust us — you can read the proof.

---

## The demoralizing lead

vault1984 is built to lead in ways that are irrational to chase.

**Global infrastructure no competitor has built**
22 regions. Every continent. Local providers in markets the major clouds don't reach — Lagos, Nairobi, and beyond. No competitor is close. Every month, the gap widens.

But the global network isn't a feature. It's a consequence of the security model. vault1984 never caches credentials — not on your laptop, not in the browser extension, not in the agent. Every access is a live fetch from the vault. The credential exists in your possession only for the instant you use it. Nothing sits around to be stolen. That's a stronger guarantee than any incumbent offers — but it means latency is felt on every single credential lookup. An agent making dozens of calls across a workflow feels every millisecond. The 22 POPs exist because zero-cache architecture requires them.

**Architecture the incumbents cannot copy**
1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane — they can read your vault. They choose not to. To give you what vault1984 gives you, they'd have to deprecate every existing vault, migrate every user, and rebuild from scratch. That's not a roadmap item. That's a company-ending decision. They are structurally, permanently trapped.

**The lowest price in the world**
$12/year, hosted. Free to self-host. 1Password charges three times that — and reads your vault. Our price is not a promotion. It's a structural weapon: defensible at scale, irrational to match at zero.

**Agent-native from day one**
Every other password manager was built for humans clicking into browsers. vault1984 was built for agents — API-first, MCP-native, designed for autonomous workflows. Everyone else is retrofitting. We shipped the category.

**Open source, Elastic-licensed**
The code is public. Security researchers audit it. Developers integrate it. The community compounds. And the Elastic license means competitors can read every line — but cannot commercially repackage what we built. They can study the map. They cannot copy the territory.

---

## Two types of competition. Neither can win.

**Incumbents** are architecturally trapped. Fixing their fundamental problem destroys their existing product. They know it. We know it. Their users will eventually know it.

**Copycats** face five simultaneous problems with no shortcuts:
- Infrastructure that took years to build across 22 regions with local providers
- Trust that only time-in-market and independent audits produce
- A price floor that requires scale they don't have
- An agent ecosystem and integration surface that compounds daily
- A license that prohibits commercializing our code

The expected value of competing with vault1984 is negative. That is not an accident.

---

## Who this is for

Anyone who got a LastPass breach email.
Any developer building AI agents that touch credentials.
Any enterprise running autonomous workflows and asking "who else can see this?"
Any individual who understood what "the company can read your vault" actually means.

The answer to all of them is the same:

**vault1984. The operator cannot read it. Anywhere in the world. At the lowest price. Verifiably.**

---

*vault1984 · vault1984.com · @vault1984*
