Why we started all of this
The big cloud services make a tempting promise: never lose a photo because your phone broke, share with family in a tap, your whole library on every device.
The price is handing your most personal moments to companies whose business is built on exploiting data. For us, that was never a deal worth making.
We tried self-hosting. For years. It gave us control, but it came with endless maintenance, and it was only an option for experts, not for our families or friends. And certainly not for the average hard working mom and dad who just want to keep their precious memories safe.
At the same time, we kept searching for a solution that combined privacy, ease of use, and European values, like the right to privacy and data protection. Sadly, nothing came even close.
That’s when we said: then let’s build it ourselves.
Our mission 🎯
Private photo storage should be the normal choice, not the expert one.
Keeping photos truly private used to mean running your own server and maintaining it forever. We did that for years. zeitkapsl is the alternative we wanted and couldn’t find: as easy as Google Photos, fully end-to-end encrypted.
Every photo is encrypted on your device before it leaves it. We store the data, you hold the key, and no one at zeitkapsl can open your library.
Photos aren’t just files. They’re the closest thing you have to a record of your life, and once they leak you can’t take them back. That’s the bar we hold ourselves to, in every decision:
We protect the user 🔐
Privacy isn’t a feature we bolted on. It’s the test every decision has to pass: does this protect the person using it? When the private way and the easy way conflict, we ship the private one and do the work to make it easy. Our encryption is independently audited and our apps are open source, so you don’t have to take our word for it.
We answer to European law 🇪🇺
Where a company is based decides which laws govern your data and which governments can compel access to it. zeitkapsl is a company registered in Vienna, owned by the people who work on it, running on servers in the EU. There is no parent company in another country, so your data can’t be reached through laws like the US CLOUD Act, only through European courts, under European data protection law.
We hold the rest of our stack to the same standard. We keep the list of outside services we depend on short, and within the same legal framework wherever we can. We’re not fully there yet, and sometimes closing a gap means building the tool ourselves, like our internal CRM and support stack.
We’re independent 🤘
zeitkapsl takes no outside investment and is built to pay for itself through subscriptions alone. That means no second revenue stream in your data, and no acquisition that quietly rewrites the terms you agreed to. We grow more slowly this way, but steadily.
We keep our footprint small 🌱
Every line of code and every server costs energy and materials. So the apps stay light enough for a phone that’s several years old, and nobody has to buy new hardware to keep their memories safe. Our servers run on 100% renewable energy, and because our software asks little of them, we don’t need many.
