https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxCR8-YsuHU  (43:50 – end of the recording; transcribed by the authors by ear, 14 Oct 2026; supplement to D15_transcript_32-57_2026-10-09.txt, segment 32:57–40:56). Reason: the vendor's reply of 14 Oct 2026 links to timestamp t=2666s (44:26), which lies outside the segment transcribed earlier. No timestamps inside the segment. Paragraphs are not attributed to speakers: they alternate between the host (questions) and Alex Logan (answers).

43:50
I think the easy way to put it would be I see broadening our horizons and making a simpler experience, something that someone would opt into at the start. So there's plenty of UX improvements we can make that's sort of the real key pass wizards that we will continue to do. That will never change. But I think for, say if I wanted to give my parents strong box, they don't know what key pass is and I sort of don't need them to. I want them to just use a password manager that I think is great. And I can also give them for free.

That's quite nice as well. But I can just give them that and they don't need to know technical details about anything. I just want to give them it and say, hey, hit new database and go. And the vision for it, which is something I repeated a few times, but effectively what if really early on in the app you basically got asked the question, do you know what key pass is? I wouldn't actually ask someone that, but in a way like what if I could just let you pick if you want a really simple way of using it or the complex way.

And that would most likely not change anything at all about the in database experience. I think we've done a really good job there and we're continuing to improve it, but I think that's really good. But I think outside of that with, picking vaults, customizing, syncing things and setting up a bunch of, I guess the more strict privacy features and so on, it's not necessarily something people will find. A really common complaint I get is people think autofill doesn't work, but it's just because they haven't turned it on. And I think most people downloading our app and paying for it because they want to use autofill, probably expect it to just be on.

So I think that kind of the answer is, let people have an easy setup button somewhere, where we're like, you just have one database and we turn on all the cool stuff and we make sure you've got convenience unlocks turned on. And it would then feel to you, like you're using one of these cloud-based solutions that doesn't have keypass details in there. It would just feel a little bit smoother to you. But I think it's incredibly important that that is something that we do in addition to what we already do. I would never want to take anything away from anyone. If anything, I actually have quite a lot more stuff I want to add, to be honest. But I also think a simple kind of option would be really good.

Nice. And then kind of behind the scenes, what does your organization look like? How many people are working there? What are the different roles?

So there's a reasonable amount of us these days on the specific Strongbox team. There's me and another product person. So whilst I work a lot on product, I also mostly look after everything to do with engineering. And then I try and look after social media and customer support too. Mostly because I think it's quite important that this app transitioned from a face that people knew. They knew they could say like, Hey, Mark, or address him directly in comments and so on. So I think it's really important we keep that. So I'm maintaining that with me. But I also think it's good to have other people involved in terms of direction, design, where we go from here. So we have a head of product who helps me with that direction. And also gives me a little bit of a kick sometimes if I'm dragging my feet, thinking something has to be tweaked with for two months instead of just letting people play with it and see what they think. I also have a team of three engineers who work with me. So we have a big mixture of skill sets within that. People who are better at design, people who are better at web stuff or iOS, iPad. There's a big mixture of skill sets. But it means that we have effectively triple the ability to work on the app that we used to have because it used to be one person working on it before we took over. So quite a lot more people involved technically. And then also just above that, we have two people looking out for where it goes from here. There's a bunch more people who work in the company looking after things like finance and so on. But just in terms of Strongbox, there's give or take five of us on a weekly basis that are looking after it.

Right, and I guess this is definitely the elephant in the room, the acquisition. And so I think Mark is the original developer? Is that correct? Okay, so that happened. And then kind of on the community side of things, there was the Strongbox acquisition. So do you mind speaking to what that looks like, how that changes things? What are some of the concerns that you've seen? I know that our audience is very wary of acquisitions. We've seen open source projects go very downhill after acquisitions. And so we kind of want it like, there's that natural reluctance to be in support of them. So maybe you can kind of speak to this and how you feel about it.

I mean, look, I think that the initial thing is no matter what happens with an acquisition, I think people are generally a little skeptical because there's been so many terrible ones. I've seen plenty of acquisitions where apps have been bought and the price has doubled the next day, or they've not had a subscription and then they've added one. There's a lot of reasons that people are wary of these. And I think what happened with Strongbox is we announced it and I think maybe didn't give people enough reassurance of what was coming. People were sort of a bit worried about all the things that usually go wrong with acquisitions where people just abandon it and jack prices up and close the source and so on. So I think there was a justifiable apprehension to us owning it. The flip side of us owning it is that there's way more people that work on it. We can work faster and we can make bigger changes to the app than one person could. But I understand why people are apprehensive. I think we did post on the Strongbox blog announcing it and Mark posted a letter too to sort of hand the reins off to us. But we just sort of rightfully had to help gain the trust of the community a bit. I think we had to put the work in to share that we weren't gonna do anything crazy and that we weren't gonna drop analytics in instantly. Which I think is what people mostly thought was going to happen. I think they presumed we'd throw in loads of analytics on the first day and then jack up prices or add subscriptions. Adding subscriptions was probably the most common thing I saw within telemetry. But Strongbox already had a subscription. We didn't add that. But it was a thing that came up a lot. And things like people thought we were gonna kill Strongbox zero, which we are not doing and I won't let happen. So something that I've definitely learned from this and is something that we will take going forward into future acquisitions is to make sure we get the point home in our announcement and really try and start getting that trust straight away. And that means, you know, whilst I did introduce myself really early and was talking to the community quite often, like it took quite a while to get around to doing like a proper sort of Q&A and things. And I think that's something that we definitely learned from. But the way I've kept things going is everything's open. I try and post in our Reddit whenever I do something new in the app. I ask for feedback a lot. I ask for future suggestions and comments. Even when people are a little bit grumpy with me, I'm still happy to hear it. Like I wanna help people get the best experience and have them not hate us, that would be great. So I think we've done quite a lot to try and help prove that we're not gonna do anything sketchy with Strongbox. Time is sort of the thing that proves that, but we learned from making announcements better. And then I'm hopeful that people have a slightly different opinion of us after the last year or so. I don't quite have a poll or anything to prove that, but I think the community of Strongbox generally feels better about it now than they did when it was announced. So pretty good, I think. We've added stuff.

To kind of round us out, I have just a couple more questions. Subscriptions, and this is actually somewhat of a criticism I have, maybe with a lot of people who are like free open source advocates. Free, people forget the meaning of free. That means freedom, not free as in beer. That is the very common metaphor that's used to help explain this. But that culture still exists, right? Where people really don't wanna pay. In fact, I don't know of any other KeyPass client off the top of my head that charges. Maybe KeyPassium has a paid plan as well in iOS, if I remember. But other than the Apple ecosystem, I can't think of a paid KeyPass client. So I might ask why should someone pay for a KeyPass client? Like just as a question, and then what are your subscription models? Because I think I actually got lifetime back in the day, and I still have lifetime.

So I think the reason for buying an app like ours kind of applies to the argument as like a whole, in that we're in a world now where there's always been open source software, but now there's probably been six new open source apps whilst we've had this conversation. They're springing up all the time. People can make what they want, and it can be great, it can be bad, it can be whatever. But there's new software all the time, and a lot of the time, people choose to make that free and push it out to the world that way. And I think that's incredibly valuable, and open source is the reason why KeyPass clients can even exist. KeyPass itself is open, and that's what powers all of these KeyPass apps. I think the choice for the person generally is, do you think the experience you get from an app like Strongbox is worth some money? A discussion I see a lot is people say, oh, KeyPass itself is open source, so why isn't Strongbox is free? But Strongbox, the reasons it gets praised are years of love and affection and lots of hard work. Developer time is definitely not free. Even when you're building it for yourself, it's quite expensive to make apps. And there's a lot to that. You probably see reasonably often, even on open source repos, there's hundreds of issues and problems all the time. And you see how much of that person's time gets eaten up with support, changes, fixes, and so on. And a lot of these open source things become a full-time job for someone. And as apps get more complex and they scale, more people have to be involved. And when more people get involved, the cost just starts going up and up and up. And supporting via open source is viable for a lot of projects. Like I pay for loads of support on GitHub these days. But for apps like ours, the craft we put into it, the team we put into it, isn't something we could sustain with open source. And that was true when Mark ran it by himself and remains true now. Except now, there's five people instead of one and we haven't changed the price because we're pretty happy with it as it is. But this sort of cost of subscriptions sustains people building great things. If no one paid for anything, then there wouldn't be great software. Most of the open source software you see is probably... Yeah, most open source software you see probably at some point had some paid application involved, which had a lot of people involved in an office somewhere. So, you know, software can be free, it can be paid. And it's just up to you if you think if a free one is fine for you, then that's okay. There's no problem with that. But if you think the paid one is right for you, then that's good too. Like you can support developing something and see it continue to improve over time.

Where I think we strike a middle ground is you can use most of Strongbox fully for free. We limit very small things, like convenience on box and auto-fill. So you can use us and what I think is a very good experience for absolutely no money. And if you want the other features, you can pay for them. But if you don't, then Strongbox is free for you. And we have a huge amount of free users and we don't get anything from that, but we're happy that people choose to use us. But we wouldn't be possible without the people who do pay for Strongbox. So it's an interesting choice people have to make. I always vote for supporting good software, but I appreciate that I'm very biased in that I make a lot of software. So I probably do want people to pay for it. But we do have options for people who really don't like subscriptions. We do let you have a lifetime option for the app. If you really don't like in-app purchases, you can grab it straight from the app store. You can grab Strongbox Pro or Xero. And if you're using the free app, you can also grab it in the app as an in-app purchase if you feel like it. So we do have an option for you for a lifetime sub, which is priced at the equivalent of a few years of subscription.

So what's next for you guys? And where can people connect with you or Strongbox? Just kind of leave it open-ended for you to kind of round things out.

So the place we're most active is there is a Strongbox subreddit where people post all the time requests, bugs, and just thoughts. We're super active in there. We reply to basically everything and try and get involved in the conversation. We also have a Strongbox Twitter account, which we don't necessarily post on super often, but we do reply to people who get in touch with us and tag us and so on. And finally, we do have just an open email inbox. So if people want to get in touch with us and speak to us, they can just fire us an email and say whatever they want. So we're pretty open to a whole bunch of different ways of getting in touch with us. You can kind of pick your poison on that one. You can open an issue on the GitHub repo, if you'd like, if that's your preferred medium. So we're kind of all over the place with communication. We just want to meet people where they are, just get in touch, give us your ideas, niggles, whatever it is. We're here for it.

Very cool. Well, thank you for coming on the podcast, Alex, and maybe someday in the future I'll be back. I think it's nothing you guys are doing. Maybe, you know, I hope the system evolves, the ecosystem evolves, and I can go back to my really clean KeyPass experience because I used to really love that, but that's something I'm hoping for, so.

I'm sure we'll get you one day. I'm excited.

Yeah. In the meantime, thank you for the work you do, because, again, it's my favorite KeyPass client, so thank you.

Appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Great speaking with you. I want to thank Alex for his time. It was an absolute pleasure to have someone working on a KeyPass project on the podcast. I think it's actually the first person from any KeyPass project on. So if you want to hear more people from other KeyPass projects, let me know which ones you guys want to hear from. Other than that, I want to thank you all for listening, and if you like this podcast, you can support it down below by becoming a Techlorian, which allows you to gain access to our Signal group, and you get my private RSS feed, and you get to also support all this content that we put out. Thank you all for listening, and I'll see you next time on Techlor Talks.