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Privacy, security & networking

Strongbox

Native keepass client for mac and ios with a lifetime licence

Price: $124.99 once

Lifetime tierA one-time plan of a subscription app

Buy direct Website

Price read on strongboxsafe.com, the page Buy direct opens.

The catch

Lifetime costs five years of the yearly plan before it starts paying off

The full picture

At $124.99 against $24.99 a year, the lifetime tier only wins if you stay about five years — which is a real bet on a small developer. It buys the app, not a sync service: you still supply the storage, whether that is iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, WebDAV or SFTP, and you own the consequences if that storage breaks. The free version is non-commercial and missing conveniences, so business use means paying. The code is AGPL on GitHub, but the App Store builds are what the licence is for.

Pays back in
23 months
Seats
No Mac count statedOne licence covers all your devices, and Family Sharing extends it to six people
Developer account
None needed
Buy once$124.99Rent 5 years$325

$200 kept over five years, and you still have the app.
Against Dashlane Premium at $65 a year, current App Store in-app annual price. Also replaces 1Password Individual at $48 a year and LastPass.

What it looks like

Strongbox: The Strongbox Mac main window, dark mode, all three panes: left sidebar with Favourites / Hierarchy (Finance, Personal, Work) / Tags / Audit Issues / Quick Views, the middle entry table (Title, Username, Password, URL, Modified), and the right detail pane for the selected NASA entry with password strength bar, tags, attachment and Markdown notes. 2048x1280 PNG.
The Strongbox Mac main window, dark mode, all three panes. Mac App Store — itunes lookup id 1500040999 (Strongbox Pro, mac-software), screenshotUrls, upscaled from the default 800x500
Strongbox: The Preferences window (General / Password Generation / AutoFill / Favicons / New Entry Defaults / Advanced tabs) open over the main window, showing the Diceware XKCD generator with sample password, count slider, separator, casing and word-list controls. 2048x1280 PNG.
The Preferences window (General / Password Generation / AutoFill / Favicons / New Entry Defaults / Advanced tabs) open over the main window, showing the Diceware XKCD generator with sample password, count slider, separator, casing and word-list controls. Mac App Store — same listing
Strongbox: The entry editor sheet over the main window: Group picker, Username, Password with strength meter, URL, Email, Tags, TOTP setup and expiry, with Notes / Custom Fields / Attachments on the right and Discard Changes / Apply Changes buttons. 2048x1280 PNG.
The entry editor sheet over the main window. Mac App Store — same listing

Images belong to their developers.

What you’re buying

Strongbox is for people who decided their passwords should live in a file they can see, back up and move, rather than in a vendor's account. The file is a KDBX database — the KeePass format — so if Strongbox vanished tomorrow you could open it in KeePassXC on Linux and carry on. What you are buying is the Apple-side polish that the open-source clients never really got: AutoFill that works in Safari and in apps, Face ID and Touch ID unlock, an SSH agent that hands keys to your terminal, YubiKey support, and sync over whatever storage you already pay for.

The one-time price is $124.99 and it is a real one-time price, not a three-year subscription wearing a hat. It covers Mac, iPhone and iPad, and Family Sharing extends it to six people, which is where the arithmetic gets comfortable — against 1Password's family plan it stops being a close call.

Against the $24.99 yearly, though, it is close. Five years is the break-even, so if you are not fairly sure you will still be running Strongbox in 2031, take the subscription and decide later. And if you are happy configuring KeePassXC yourself and do not need mobile AutoFill, that is free and does the same encryption.

What owners report

Points that recur across the discussions below. A report of what users say, not our verdict: we don’t review software.

Praised

  • Asked for a KeePass client they would trust on Apple hardware, commenters keep arriving at Strongbox and citing the same list, native apps, AutoFill, YubiKey and a one-time option
  • Multi-year owners say the Apple-side integration, biometrics, Apple Watch unlock and keychain AutoFill, is what kept them off the open-source desktop clients

Criticised

  • Users repeatedly point out the public repository cannot be built, and argue that a security app trading on an open-source badge should be verifiable
  • Owners keep reporting macOS AutoFill refusing to offer Strongbox unless iCloud Keychain is switched on too; the developer's answer is that this is Apple's bug, not his

Details

The price in full

$124.99 one-time for Strongbox Pro, labelled "One time purchase" on the developer's pricing page, next to $2.99/month and $24.99/year for the same Pro feature set. One licence covers all your devices and can be shared with up to six people through Family Sharing. A feature-limited free version exists for non-commercial use. The page notes that your price may vary with your App Store country, so $124.99 is the US figure.

The Strongbox page at strongboxsafe.com
The developer’s own page. strongboxsafe.com, captured 22 Sep 2026
Free trial
Yes
Works offline
Yes
Apple Silicon
Native
On Setapp
Yes
Minimum macOS
not stated
App Store rating
4.7 from 4,069 people
Developer
Phoebe Code Limited
Source
github.com

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