Most of us now juggle dozens of logins. Reusing one easy password everywhere is a bit like using the same key for your front door, your mailbox, and your office. One small leak can suddenly matter everywhere. A password manager fixes that habit, but the category can feel crowded: extra upsells, tracking you did not notice, and cloud rules that take patience to understand.
Zen Passwords is our attempt to go the other way on Apple hardware. You pick one master password you can actually remember. The vault is encrypted on the phone, tablet, or laptop you already trust. When we offer sync, we want it to ride on your Apple ID instead of yet another account from us that sits in the middle of your life. We are still building; nothing here promises a ship date, only the direction you can hold us to in public.
Why build another password manager?
At ZenProducts we keep asking one question: does this app need drama to do its job? A vault fails the moment it feels pushy or vague, because you are being asked to store access to banking, doctors, and family photos. We want the tone to feel like a competent neighbor explaining the lock on their shed, not a billboard.
So we are writing for someone who visits once and leaves with three clear pictures: what is protected, where it lives on disk, and what happens if the master password is gone. Pricing will be ordinary and stated plainly when we ship. Until then, the Zen Passwords page tracks what is locked in versus what is still moving.
Compared with saving everything in the browser or on sticky notes in a drawer, we want Zen Passwords to reward the quiet choice: unique passwords, filled in fast, without a dashboard full of tricks.
What "zero knowledge" means here
The phrase gets overused. For us it is simple: ZenProducts should not receive your master password or a copy of the vault we can decrypt. Unlocking happens on your device. That is what lets us say, honestly, that if your spouse or roommate picks up your phone, the app still does not spill open for them, unless you have chosen to share access or they know your master password. It also means we will not run a "forget your password, we will fix it from our side" service for the vault itself, because that kind of back door is exactly what we are trying to avoid.
The tradeoff is real. Lose the master password, skip recovery you set up yourself, and we cannot open the vault for you. That is the point. A stolen laptop or a cloudy backup should not turn into plaintext in our inbox just because someone asked nicely.
Encryption without the homework
On-device encryption comes before optional sync. Under the hood we lean on well-known pieces: AES-256-GCM for the vault data, Argon2id to make guessing the master password slow and expensive for an attacker. You can think of it as the same class of tooling serious products use to protect real money and real records. The exact file formats and security notes will ship with the app so you are not asked to treat a blog post like an audit report.
Day to day you should lean on Face ID, Touch ID, or Optic ID where the hardware allows, and let the app ask for the full master password now and then so you do not forget it.
What we expect to ship
The public roadmap (same detail as the product page) covers logins, cards, Wi-Fi keys, licenses, notes, folders, tags, search, and two-factor codes next to the passwords they protect. One place to look instead of bouncing between half a dozen apps.
We intend a free tier that is genuinely usable for trying a migration, and a paid tier only if you outgrow volume limits, not because we hid basic features behind a paywall.
- Device-first vault; optional encrypted sync tied to your Apple ID when we turn it on
- Biometrics for convenience, plus occasional full-password prompts so your real passphrase stays familiar
- No ad slots and no business plan that needs to read your secrets
- Plain-language privacy copy and subscription terms in the app at launch
Who we are building for
If your week mostly happens on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and you would rather keep logins in one calm place than scattered across extensions and spreadsheets, this is for you. If your first question is "can the developers read my vault?" the answer we work toward is no.
How this fits the rest of ZenProducts
ZenProducts already ships Zen Slate for notes and Zen Horology for watch collectors. Zen Passwords is the credential-shaped version of the same instinct: local-first where it matters, honest limits, no theatrics. The About page goes deeper on how we think about data if you want the wider picture.
If you want to follow along
There is no App Store listing yet. For feature lists, visuals, and legal stubs as they land, use the Zen Passwords app page. Direct questions go to hello@zenproducts.ai. When we hit a milestone worth a changelog, we will post it here.