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 Password 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.
Chapter one
Every screen below is the real thing, taken from a running vault by a script rather than drawn for this page. Scroll through one and it moves the way it moves.
Opening it
The address of your server, your email, and the one password Alpha Password cannot reset. Nothing derived from it is sent anywhere.
Inside
Ten categories to start with, plus any you invent while filing an item. Search matches titles, usernames and addresses.
Open
Three panes on a desk, so finding something and reading it are not the same click undone.
Filing
A vault imported this morning should not open on a screen where everything sits in Uncategorised, so Alpha Password guesses from the address.
Filing
The count beside each name is the answer to "how much of this is mine to worry about", before you click anything.
Not only logins
A password manager that can only hold passwords sends everything else to a note, and a note is where information goes to stop being usable.
Not only logins
It reads the scheme off the number, checks the number the way a payment form would, and keeps the expiry as the field it actually is.
The authenticator
The ring beside them says whether the code will still be valid by the time you have pasted it. Almost nothing else shows you that.
The authenticator
The Mac app clears a copied secret after thirty seconds, and checks first that you have not copied something else since. A web page cannot.
The checkup
Reused passwords, guessable ones, and logins with no second factor — with the items listed, not just counted.
The checkup
Alpha Password holds no breach list, so this asks somebody who does. What that costs is written on the button's own screen rather than in a policy.
The generator
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.
The generator
Take away the symbols and the digits, shorten it, and the figure falls — because it was measuring the settings, not decorating them.
Everywhere else
Vault, Authenticator, Checkup, Generator, Settings. Not a cut-down phone version of a desktop app and not a different product on a small screen — the panes stack instead of sitting side by side, and that is most of the difference. One Rust core does the cryptography on all of them.
Chapter two
Every password manager promises not to look. The difference worth paying attention to is whether looking is something the arrangement makes impossible.
The proof
On the left, what you see. On the right, the row the server keeps for it — copied out of a running Alpha Password server, not drawn for this page.
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 Password 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.
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 Password's protocol specification lists these in the open. This page exists partly so they are not first read in somebody else's write-up.
Chapter three
The end of a marketing page is normally where the awkward parts go. They are here because they are the parts that decide whether this is the right thing for you.
Sharing · step one
Reached from the item, because the question people have is "who can see this" and not "what have I shared".
Sharing · step two
Alpha Password's server could hand over its own key instead of your friend's. The password would then be sealed to the server, and every screen would look exactly as it does now.
Sharing · step three
Sealed in your browser to that person, before it is sent. The server never sees it.
Moving in
A CSV from Chrome, Safari, 1Password, LastPass or Bitwarden. Import is also what an empty vault leads with, rather than something in a submenu.
Moving in
What each column was taken to mean, what will be created, and every row it could not read — named, with the reason.
Compared
A comparison that only lists what we win is an advertisement. Here is the whole board, as of September 2026.
| Alpha Password | 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 |
| Cards and identities | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Emergency access | Yes | Yes | Premium | Paid |
| Breach checking | Yes, opt-in | 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 Password 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 Password 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.
The breach check is off until you turn it on, and the screen shows what leaves your device before it leaves: the first five characters of a hash, one request per distinct password. The password itself never goes, and the reply is padded so its size says nothing either.
Read-only sharing is refused rather than accepted and ignored: nothing in Alpha Password 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.
The Mac app takes a copied password back after thirty seconds and checks first that you have not copied something else since. A page gets neither ability, so nothing here clears your clipboard and Settings says so.
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 Password — 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 Password'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 Password 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 Password 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.
Yes, and they are generated rather than taken by hand: a script signs into a real server, imports a demo vault through Alpha Password's own importer, and photographs every screen twice, once per palette. One thing in them is not literal — the server address, which would otherwise show the throwaway loopback port the shoot ran on.
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 that Alpha Password cannot reset and a recovery key you write down — which is the whole trade, stated before you make it.