Quick answer
Yes — Secretbox is a one-time-purchase alternative to Doppler Team. It costs $39 once, while Doppler Team runs $12/user/mo — about $144 per year, every year. Projects, environments and versioned secrets with a CLI that pipes straight into your .env. It is for people who want the job done on their own hardware without a renewal date — not for teams that live inside Doppler Team's ecosystem.
The verdict
Switch to Secretbox if you are an individual or small team paying Doppler Team $12/user/mo for work your own machine can do. Under four months of Doppler for a five-person team already costs more than Secretbox, which then never charges per seat again.
Stay with Doppler Team if your workflow depends on its integrations, you need enterprise features (SSO, admin controls, SLAs), or your team is large enough that per-seat collaboration tooling is worth the bill. Secretbox does not try to replicate those.
Head to head
| Secretbox | Doppler Team | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $39 once | $12/user/mo |
| 5-person team, 3 years | $39 | ~$2,160 |
| Encrypted at rest | Yes, envelope AES-256-GCM | Yes |
| Your secrets on your server | Yes | No |
| Versioning + rollback | Yes | Yes |
| Env diff | Yes | Yes |
| CLI pull / run injection | Yes | Yes |
| Audit log | Yes | Higher tiers only |
| 5-year cost | $39 | $720 |
Where Doppler Team still wins
- Ecosystem and integrations. Established tools accumulate years of third-party integrations, templates and add-ons. If your workflow is wired into Doppler Team's ecosystem, switching means rebuilding that plumbing — a real cost.
- Team and enterprise features. Shared workspaces, granular permissions, SSO, audit logs and a vendor to call when something breaks — that is what the higher subscription tiers actually buy, and a pay-once app does not come with it.
- Familiarity and hiring. Doppler Team is the name people already know. Onboarding a team onto a tool nobody has used before takes time the subscription never charges for.
Where Secretbox wins
- Price, permanently. $39 once versus $144/yr for as long as you use it. There is no renewal, no seat count and no tier gate.
- Envelope encryption at rest. Every value gets its own random AES-256-GCM data key, wrapped by a master key that lives only in your .env and never in the database.
- Projects and environments. Organize projects into dev, staging, prod and custom environments, with secret versioning and one-click rollback.
- Audit-logged reveals. Every reveal, pull, edit and rollback is recorded with who, what and when.
The math
Under four months of Doppler for a five-person team already costs more than Secretbox, which then never charges per seat again.
- After 1 year: Secretbox has cost you $39 total — Doppler Team has cost $144.
- After 3 years: Secretbox is still $39 — the subscription is at $432.
- After 5 years: Secretbox is still $39 — the subscription is at $720.
Common questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes. Secretbox is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/env-secrets-manager-mvp and always will be. The $39 buys the packaged 1-click installer and setup; building from source is free.
Where do my secrets live?
In a SQLite database on your own server, envelope-encrypted per value. Nothing goes to us or any third-party cloud.
Is this zero-knowledge like Vaultly?
No, and honestly so: this is server-side encryption, because a secrets manager that feeds CI must hold the key to hand plaintext to your deploys. If you need client-side zero-knowledge crypto, that is our Vaultly product. Protect the box and protect the .env.
Is this a subscription in disguise?
No. $39 once, no renewal, no per-seat billing, no license server. Just back up your MASTER_KEY, because without it your secrets are unrecoverable.
Try Secretbox — $39, one time
Or get Secretbox plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.