What Happens to Your Vault If Kinship Vault Disappears?
It is a fair question to ask of any app you trust with your most important documents. Companies change, get acquired, or shut down. Here is why a local-first vault answers it better than a cloud service can.
You are about to hand an app your passports, insurance papers, and the documents your family would need in a crisis. A sensible worry surfaces: what if the company behind it goes away? With most cloud services, that worry is well founded, because your data lives on their servers and leaves when they do.
The reassuring part is that the answer depends entirely on the architecture, not on promises. A vault that keeps your data on your device gives a very different answer from one that keeps it on someone else's.
Key takeaways
- Your vault lives on your device, not on a Kinship Vault server, so there is nothing to switch off.
- Your 24-word recovery passphrase is the master key. It does not depend on the app existing.
- Encrypted export lets you take your data out on your own terms.
- The tradeoff of local-first: you own recovery, so keep your passphrase and a backup safe.
Why most cloud apps make this scary
With a typical cloud service, your files live on the provider's servers, and the app is the only door in. If the company shuts down, gets acquired, or changes its terms, your access is at the mercy of that decision. Even where you can export, you may be racing a deadline, and you were never really holding your own data. You were renting a window onto it.
This is vendor lock-in, and for something as long-lived as your identity documents it is a real risk. The documents you store today may need to outlive the app you stored them in.
Local-first changes the question
Kinship Vault is built local-first. There is no Kinship Vault server that holds your vault, no account, and no master password on our side. Your documents are stored on your device and encrypted with a key that was generated on your device and sealed in its secure hardware. The app is a tool for reading a vault that is already yours, not a gate to a vault we keep.
If the data is on your device and the key is on your device, the company going away cannot take either one.
That is the heart of data independence. Your access does not hinge on our continued existence, our servers, or our goodwill.
Your key is 24 words, not our database
The single most important safeguard is the recovery passphrase. Those 24 words are the master key to your vault, derived on your device. They are not a hint that unlocks something on our end. As long as you have kept them, you hold the actual key, independent of any app, account, or company. This is the same design we describe in what a zero-knowledge password manager is.
How to make your independence real
Local-first hands you the keys, which means it also hands you the responsibility to look after them. A few habits turn "the app cannot lose your data" into "you cannot lose your data either":
- Save your passphrase offline. Write the 24 words down and store them somewhere safe and physical, not in a cloud note.
- Keep an encrypted export or backup. The optional backup encrypts on your device first, then lands in your own iCloud or Google Drive, so you always have a second copy under your own key. See how backup works.
- Consider the Recovery Network. Splitting your key across trusted contacts (any 3 of 5 rebuild it) means no single lost device ends the story.
The short version
The right question is not "do you trust the company forever" but "where does the data live and who holds the key". With Kinship Vault, the answer is: on your device, and you do. The app disappearing would be an inconvenience, not a loss, as long as you have kept your passphrase and a backup. That is what owning your data actually means.
A vault you own, not one you rent.
Your data and your key stay on your device across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Android. No server holds your vault.
See how recovery works