Your master password never leaves your device. Everything is encrypted before it is sent, so the server stores ciphertext it has no key for — not as a policy, as an arrangement. Alpha could hand over its whole database and still not have your vault.
What moves between them is the middle panel: bytes with no key attached.
The proof
On the left, what you see. On the right, the row the server keeps for it — copied out of a running Alpha server, not drawn for this page.
What it does
Every screenshot here is the real thing, generated from a running vault.
Ten categories to start with, plus any you invent while filing an item. Alpha guesses the category when you save and says that it guessed, so the guess never quietly becomes your decision.
Search matches titles, usernames and addresses. On a desk it is three panes, so opening an item never hides the list you found it in.
Six digits are only half an answer. The ring beside them says whether the code will still be valid by the time you have pasted it.
Codes live inside a login or stand on their own, and the same RFC 6238 implementation produces them on the phone, the Mac and the watch — one implementation, so they cannot disagree by a digit.
Reused passwords, guessable ones, and logins with no second factor — with the items listed, not just counted. "Three reused passwords" is a statistic; "Netflix · Reddit" is something you can go and fix.
It runs on your device, over your vault, and sends nothing anywhere to do it.
The bit count is the logarithm of how many passwords your settings can actually produce, worked out by inclusion–exclusion over the classes you required — not length × log₂(alphabet) printed next to a "must contain a digit" switch that contradicts it.
Switch everything off and it refuses in words rather than greying out a control and leaving you to guess which one.
How it works
Argon2id, 64 MiB and three passes, on your device. The same cost in a browser as on a phone — no discount for being on the web.
Items are sealed on the device that wrote them. Every field carries its own timestamp so two devices editing at once merge rather than overwrite.
It stores blobs, refuses stale writes, and hands them back. It is deliberately dumb, because anything clever there would need to understand your vault.
Most managers send something derived from your master password and ask the server to compare it. Alpha uses OPAQUE: both sides prove the password matches without the server ever holding anything that could be replayed or cracked offline. None of 1Password, Bitwarden or Proton Pass does this.
Compared
A comparison that only lists what we win is an advertisement. Here is the whole board, as of August 2026.
| Alpha | 1Password | Bitwarden | Proton Pass | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| End-to-end encrypted | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sign-in without a password-equivalent (OPAQUE) | Yes | No | No | No |
| Open source | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Run your own server | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Built-in authenticator | Yes | Yes | Premium | Paid |
| Apple Watch app | Yes | No | No | No |
| Passkeys | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Emergency access | Yes | Yes | Premium | Paid |
| Breach checking | Coming, opt-in | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cards and identities | Coming | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Share with someone without an account | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Shared vaults and family plans | No, deliberately | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Third-party security audit | Not yet | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Windows and Linux apps | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Shared vaults are the one row Alpha does not intend to win. A shared container means rotating a vault key and re-wrapping every member's copy every time somebody is removed — a different product, not a bigger version of this one. Alpha shares one item with one person instead.
What it will not do
Every password manager has these gaps. Most are quiet about them, which is how an absence gets read as a feature that works.
Breach checking is coming, and it will be off until you turn it on. When you do, the screen shows the five characters of a hash prefix that leave your device before they leave it — the whole password never does, and the reply is padded so its size says nothing either.
Read-only sharing is refused rather than accepted and ignored: nothing in Alpha carries a recipient's edit back to the owner, so offering it would be a promise the whole stack silently breaks.
Emergency access waits the number of days you chose. That wait is a promise the server keeps, not one the cryptography enforces, and every screen that mentions it says so.
A page is fetched fresh every visit, so it trusts the server not to serve different code tomorrow. The installed clients run code that was checked once and then pinned. The vault page tells you this before you sign in.
What the server sees
Zero-knowledge is a claim about content, not about the shape of your traffic. A server that stores your vault necessarily learns some things about it, and pretending otherwise is the part usually left out.
Alpha's protocol specification lists these in the open. This page exists partly so they are not first read in somebody else's write-up.
Get it
The same Rust core does the cryptography on every one of them, so a password generated on a watch and a code read on a laptop come from the same implementation rather than from six that agree until they don't.
The full vault as a web page. Nothing to install, and the least trustworthy way to use Alpha — the page says so itself.
Autofill, passkeys, attachments, sharing, emergency access.
Three panes: the rail, your items, and the one you picked, side by side.
One-time codes, and only those. A watch cannot fill a form and is the screen other people read over your shoulder.
System autofill and passkeys, with the same sixteen screens.
Fills the page you are on and nothing else. It asks for one origin — your server's — rather than for every site you visit.
Every one of them has a server field. Run Alpha's server or run your own — it is the same software, and it learns the same nothing either way.
Questions
You use the recovery key you were given when you made the account, which is why that screen makes you tick a box before it lets you continue. If both are gone, the vault is gone. Nobody at Alpha holds a copy of either — that is the same fact as "the server cannot read your vault", seen from the other side.
No. All three of the managers in the table above have been, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. What exists instead: the protocol specification is published, including its own list of limitations; the source is open; and the parameters any account was created with can be read back from the server at any time.
Yes — a CSV from Chrome, Safari, 1Password, LastPass or Bitwarden. Alpha shows you what it found and what each column was taken to mean before it writes anything, and names every row it could not read. Export is the same file, so leaving is as easy as arriving.
Nothing yet, and there is no paid tier to upsell you to. When there is a price it will be for the hosted server, and running your own will stay free.
Trust the arrangement rather than the person: the server holds ciphertext it has no key for, the protocol is written down, and the code is open. Then check the arrangement — the row on this page comes out of a real database, and you can get the same one out of your own server.
No account is needed to look. Making one takes a master password Alpha cannot reset and a recovery key you write down — which is the whole trade, stated before you make it.