Secs-man, a secrets manager you can (not) rely on
Details
- External ID
- 48672389
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Secs-man, a secrets manager you can (not) rely on
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- June 25, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 31
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7930327868852459
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
This is a tool to manage encrypted local backups of secrets. The core idea is that it aims to be usable without depending on it, meaning that even if the software disappeared from the face of Earth tomorrow, your data would still be recoverable.It also integrates nicely with NixOS (which is what I use, though it does not require NixOS to be used).I have summed up a bit of explanation and some answers to reasonable questions in a blog post: https://baldino.dev/blog/secs-man/
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Security
- Function
- Vertical SaaS
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- secrets manager
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes A local CLI secret manager that creates encrypted backups (using age or GPG) and outputs flat files or NixOS configs is standard scripting and CLI tooling easily handled by AI assistants.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: KeePass, pass utility, fnox, sops/sops-nix, age
Concerns raised: Unclear motivation compared to age encryption tool, Limited unique functionality beyond age orchestration, Confusing product name pronunciation and clarity, Not suitable for password manager use cases
Feature requests: Read passphrase from file or environment variable, Nix wrapper support instead of symlinks, Support multiple encryption tools beyond age, Mixed multiple stores interface
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 112 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #28 of 113 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 225 days after the earliest competitor.
- Password manager · ph · 2026-09-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Lockenv · hn · 2025-12-08 · 105 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Liberty · hn · 2026-01-14 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- A password system with no database, no sync, and nothing to breach · hn · 2026-02-06 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Keepr · hn · 2025-11-14 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- CambiOS · hn · 2026-06-11 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- replicaro · github · 2026-09-20 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Sesame · hn · 2026-08-28 · 66 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.