July 3, 2026
Trust issues, but make it passwords
Show HN: Bramble – Local-first password manager
A no-cloud password app drops, and the crowd instantly asks: who made this and why so bold
TLDR: Bramble is a new password app that keeps your logins on your own devices instead of on a company server, and that privacy-first pitch got people excited. But the comments quickly turned into a trust debate, with fans cheering the no-cloud idea while skeptics asked who built it and why it reinvented syncing.
A new password manager called Bramble just walked into Hacker News with a big promise: your secrets stay on your own devices. No company account, no central company vault, no giant server waiting to become the next horror-story data leak. It works in Chrome-style browsers and on phones, and it can sync directly between your devices instead of parking your passwords on somebody else’s computers. For privacy fans, that pitch hit like catnip.
And wow, the comments immediately turned into a mix of applause, suspicion, and classic internet side-eye. The biggest cheer came from the "finally, keep Big Tech out of my private life" camp, with people calling local-first password managers “the way forward” and praising the idea of keeping everything on-disk. But then came the needle-scratch moment: for a product guarding your most sensitive logins, one commenter basically said, love the mission, but who exactly are you? That was the thread’s juiciest tension — trust the software, sure, but can you trust the mystery person behind it?
Then the peanut gallery got curious in the most 2020s way possible: what AI tools did you use? Another commenter zeroed in on the homemade sync system with a blunt little “Why?” — the kind of one-word challenge that can launch a hundred-reply debate. So the mood was clear: people are excited by the anti-cloud rebellion, but they’re also treating this like a first date with someone who says all the right things and still hasn’t shown ID.
Key Points
- •Bramble is a local-first password manager that stores an encrypted vault on users’ own devices without requiring an account or company-hosted server.
- •It is available as a Chromium browser extension and as native iOS and Android apps using the same vault format and shared Rust cryptographic core.
- •The product supports both file-based sync through user-chosen storage locations and direct peer-to-peer synchronization between devices without a cloud relay.
- •Its cryptography stack includes Argon2id for key derivation, AES-256-GCM for data encryption, and envelope encryption so each vault entry has its own key.
- •Bramble includes native autofill, passkeys, biometric unlock, hardware-key-based unlocking, recovery codes, TOTP generation, and storage for logins, cards, secure notes, and SSH keys.