Blog / HexaVault 2.0 - Secure Information Vault

HexaVault 2.0 - Secure Information Vault

I relaunched HexaVault some time ago. It's a project I've felt strongly about for many years. Back in the 2000s, when I was running my IT services business, I needed a way to store various information about different projects and clients: server details, domains, secrets, various passwords, API tokens, what not. Along with that, I also felt a need to store my own passwords and personal info like various identity documents, numbers, logins, etc. One of the earliest apps I used for this purpose was eWallet and SPB Wallet. Those were apps for Pocket PC, as I had a Windows Pocket PC device back then. As I moved on from Pocket PC, I developed my own application called InfoBox. There was nothing fancy about it, just a simple window split into two panels. It was more of an encrypted note-taking app. I used it for a few years, but I wanted something more structured.

Around that time, various password manager products were being introduced. LastPass was the first one I heard of. Then there were KeePass, 1Password, Dashlane, Keeper, Bitwarden, etc. I tried some of them but found them too limited for what I wanted.

What did I want? I wanted templates and full customisation ability. I wanted to store multiple pieces of information of the same type. Take a bank account, for example. An Indian bank account has:

Or take a credit card. A credit card has so many details to store:

I wanted a way to add these as fields and then save it as a template, so I could use it to save details for multiple bank accounts or credit cards. Same for a domain, mutual fund folio, insurance policy, PAN, passport, Aadhaar, utilities like electricity, telephone, gas, etc.

All the password manager products in the market focused on storing passwords. True to their name, they were excellent at storing passwords and auto-filling them on login forms. But I wanted more than a password manager.

That's when I decided to make my own product. I came up with the name HexaVault. I first made a web app that only I used. Then I got the Android and iOS apps made, and they were released in September 2017.

The mobile apps for HexaVault were completely offline, with local storage. I had a web version too, but I never made it public, only I used it.

I decided to go big with HexaVault. I thought I could raise funding and make HexaVault a household product. I was inspired by the success of Wunderlist, a very simple to-do app. List maker/to-do apps are a dime a dozen, yet in that crowded market, the product managed to grow to 13 million users and was eventually acquired by Microsoft for more than $100M, all while being a free product. I thought I could build a free password manager. Everyone has passwords, so there's a huge market. I applied to some VC bootstrap programs, including Y Combinator and Sequoia Surge, and reached out to some prominent VC funds. I got a few meetings, including one with a partner at Sequoia India. They showed interest but asked me to keep in touch and approach them once I had a few million users. HexaVault had a few thousand installs. All in all, V1 reached a max of 10K users. It never grew beyond that. I tried paid advertising, but it attracted the wrong kind of users, people who downloaded HexaVault thinking it would help them retrieve lost passwords. One of the biggest drawbacks of the offline-only model was that there was no automatic sync or backup. Users wanted to use the vault on two devices, and when they got a new phone, they expected their info from the old one to be there. I thought users would like the offline-only model, but they wanted convenience instead. Eventually, the user count dropped. I lost motivation and moved on.

I kept using HexaVault myself because it was serving my purpose, though I didn't update it for a long time. Eventually, it was removed from the Google and Apple app stores.

I tried to move away from HexaVault and checked out the latest offerings to see if anything else would suit my needs. 1Password and Bitwarden were now industry leaders and mature products. I tried both. They were still mostly password managers: yes, they had custom fields, but there was still no ability to create custom templates. The display order of the main fields was fixed. The apps were still rigid in the way they worked. I realised that, at least for my purpose, HexaVault had no alternative.

So I rekindled the idea. I mustered enough courage and motivation to give it another shot, and decided to make it a proper cloud-based password manager that would sync automatically across devices. This time I also had AI coding agents to help me. I revamped and rewrote the web version, then coded the Android and iOS apps and released HexaVault 2.0 a few months back. I added all the features a modern password manager should have. Some are yet to come, like autofill, which will be added soon.

This time, instead of making it a free product, I released it as a freemium app. The basic app is free. There's a Pro version that costs $25/year and gives the ability to add file attachments, so you can actually attach a scanned copy of your passport with the passport details, or a scanned copy of a policy document with the insurance policy details.

I have no grand ambitions this time. I'm going slow on promotions. I've come to understand that even though everybody has passwords, most people don't actually care about storing them securely. People are fine using the same password everywhere and using their kid's date of birth as a PIN. I can only hope that if I make a good product that ticks all the boxes and is the best and most convenient, someone will find it useful and use it. I'd love to have millions of users, but I'm keeping my expectations realistic.

And guess what, I already have my first paid user! Someone I don't know found it, liked it, and paid for it.

You can check out HexaVault at hexavault.com

Published on 01 July 2026

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