Our goal is to simplify this as much as possible. We use client-side end-to-end encryption so you don't have to trust a third party, and pricing on our paid plans is based on number of users, not number of secrets.
Just like the rest of Airbnb started before VPCs were GA and thus required a large engineering investment to move everything to VPCs, we started on the secret management stuff before there were a lot of good other options available (though arguably Hashicorp Vault was around and mature enough at the time, and would have been the best alternative). I haven't looked at envkey for production use but I've definitely considered it for home use since it's just so deliciously simple.
[0] https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/production-secret-mana...
I know there's a free "community" hosted version, but I'm not sure what the differences is outside of the limits and support, and I'd prefer to see the pricing scale up a bit more gently than 0 -> $150 as soon as I reach the limits of the free offering.
Very clearly cut down to the point where it's not feasible for anything outside of toy projects.
The open source version is fully functional and can definitely scale beyond toy projects. You don't get high availability, multi-instance clustering, auto-scaling, multi-region failover etc. built in, but if you put it on a beefy host it can easily handle a large number of users and a very high request rate.
The way I think of it is we give you the fully functional server, but charge for advanced infrastructure and a few advanced features (SSO/Teams).
It's comparable to the open source version of a tool like Vault where you get the server, but need to implement advanced stuff like HA, auto-scaling, networking, etc. yourself, or else use a paid version.
As far as I can see, this is fully available in the open-source version of Vault: https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/ha-with-consul
This is only true if I can be confident that I can replicate the hosted setup with the open-source version if I invested the necessary resources. Otherwise, the existence of an open-source option adds little value. In fact it can turn me off from a product since it'd seem like they're using open source as a marketing hook with no real intention of empowering users to be able to actually move off their hosted platforms.
This is why Vault requires another piece like Consul (plus a whole lot of tricky infra/networking work) to achieve HA.
That said, we could allow users of the Open Source version to specify a url via an env var to look up a host's internal IP so that clustering would work.
Auto-scaling is provider-specific though, so I don't see how that could be baked in. Same with secure networking.
I'll also just say that while we do want the open source version to be fully functional (if a bit more DIY), another motivation for us that I see as equally important for a security product is transparency.
While it's inarguably crucial for any clients implementing end-to-end encryption to be open source, I think there's a lot of value in open sourcing the server as well (regardless of how practical it is to actually run) so that users can know what's happening on the server-side, see that the code is high quality and tested, and so on.
> EnvKey Business Self-Hosted runs in an AWS account you control. You can use it with any host or cloud provider.
Is a bit confusing, that section should be clarified a bit. Does it mean that you can run the systems using it somewhere else? Does it mean other variants of EnvKey can be run everywhere? ...
2FA is already effectively built-in to EnvKey through device-based authorization. A user can only sign in to EnvKey from an authorized device, so an email account compromise won't be enough for an attacker to gain access--they would also need access to an authorized device.
A passphrase can optionally be supplied on top of this for an additional factor (though it's unnecessary if you're already using OS-level disk encryption).
It's basically the same model as SSH. And imo it's superior to SMS or app-based 2FA (perhaps not token-based, which I'm open to adding). It handles the main threat models (phishing/email account compromise) with far better UX and convenience.
"Is a bit confusing, that section should be clarified a bit. Does it mean that you can run the systems using it somewhere else? Does it mean other variants of EnvKey can be run everywhere? ..."
I agree this could be less confusing.
The EnvKey host server runs in your AWS account, but that doesn't mean that apps you integrate EnvKey with are in any way limited to AWS. You could have your apps running in Heroku, GCP, Azure, or whatever, and integrate with your self-hosted EnvKey installation for configuration and secrets management with no problem.
Is that clearer?