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Comment by bespoke_engnr | Hacker News Reader

Charging $1 per secret is interesting. I wonder if that will affect how people design their application.

We've had a pretty splendid experience with Vault so far, so I'm not exactly in the market for another solution, but this looks interesting.

I assume you started development on this because Vault et al didn't exist yet at the time? Or was there another driver?

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Strongbox was designed prior to AWS Parameter Store, and took its inspiration from projects like Fugue CredStash and similar AWS KMS based projects. While there are certainly pros and cons with the different approaches, which you can see in the linked comparison table, I think one of Strongbox' strengths is that it is easy to set up, and you get a lot of convenience functionality related to secrets management. Not having to maintain running services, and natural compartmentalization using both AWS IAM and AWS accounts was two of the drivers.

$1 per group of secrets, e.g. a service. In many cases I think this is fine, but it is certainly not a strength.

Thanks for the additional explanation, and for clarifying RE: $1/service; that makes sense.

neat, so the invoice already leaks about the number of secrets stored?

The charges are for the AWS services that Strongbox uses to implement its functionality. That's $1 per KMS key, which can be used to manage multiple secrets, plus the cost of the storage backend. In the most common setup, DynamoDB tables are being used for this.

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