Some things are just miserable to do on a phone. A 20-digit policy number is one of them. So is a bank account number copied off a statement, or a retirement annuity reference that runs to two lines of letters and digits. You start with good intentions, you get four fields in, you mistype one, and the whole thing goes back on the pile of admin you’ll deal with later.
Then there’s the other half of it. The paperwork that belongs in a Legacy Binder is rarely all in one place to begin with, and a fair amount of it is already on your laptop. The lease is in your downloads folder. The signed will your attorney emailed is sitting in your inbox. Getting those onto a phone means mailing them to yourself, or plugging in a cable and hoping the phone shows up as a drive.
A vault with half your documents in it isn’t much of a vault. So we built a way to add things from a computer, at vaultneur.com/add. There’s nothing to install.
Why this took a while
Most apps solve this in an afternoon. Log in on the web, upload, done. Vaultneur can’t do that, because of the thing that makes the vault worth having in the first place: your key is derived on your phone and stays there. A web page that could upload into your vault would be a web page holding a key, and a server that could hand a browser that key would be a server able to open your vault itself.
So we were left with an awkward question. How do you let a computer put something into a vault that it fundamentally cannot read?
The post box
Think of a post box on a street corner. Anyone can post a letter in. Nobody can reach in and take one out, including the person who posted it thirty seconds ago. The slot only works in one direction.
Your computer gets a key that behaves like that. It can seal a file shut so that only your phone can open it, and it can’t open anything at all, including the file it just sealed. The server only ever receives ciphertext. That’s what zero-knowledge means when you look at it from the outside: nothing in the chain between your laptop and your phone is ever holding something it could read.
What pairing actually does
You open the page on your computer and a QR code appears. You scan it with the Vaultneur app, and the two devices are connected.
The detail worth knowing is that the code on your screen is only half of what’s needed. Two separate secrets are generated for each session, and only one of them is in the QR. Somebody photographing your monitor from across a coffee shop ends up with a piece that does nothing on its own.
Nothing files itself
What you send from the computer doesn’t save itself into your vault. Items land in an inbox and wait there. You pick up your phone, look at what arrived, and file each one where it belongs: ID, Medical, Financial, Crypto Wallet, Login or Other.
That’s deliberate. Filing happens on the device that holds the keys, which keeps the decision with you rather than with a browser tab. It also means a mistake made on the computer is something you can discard instead of something you have to go and undo.
Files are capped at 26 MB each, which covers scanned documents and photographed paperwork comfortably.
Sessions that close themselves
Pairing sessions are short by design. If you open the page and never scan the code, it expires after 10 minutes. Once you’ve paired, you have an hour. Twenty-four hours after a session expires, its records are deleted.
The point is that there’s no quiet connection sitting open in a browser tab you forgot about on Tuesday.
One page, built differently
The pairing page carries no analytics and no cookies, which is why you’ll notice there’s no consent banner on it either. It’s the only page on the site built outside the shared layout, specifically so that nothing third-party loads while you’re connecting a computer to your vault.
Privacy policies are easy to write. This one shows up in what the page doesn’t load.
Trying it
Open vaultneur.com/add on your computer. Open Vaultneur on your phone, choose My computer, and scan the code. Type the long reference numbers with a real keyboard, drag across the files that are already sitting on your desktop, then finish up on your phone.
The vault is still on your phone. The keys are still on your phone. The computer is just a better keyboard.