Why we made backup free forever
By TOTP Authenticator team ·
We will never charge you to get your own accounts back. Offline backup, restore, and moving to a new phone are free, permanently, for every user on every platform we ship. That isn’t an introductory offer or a limited-time thing. It’s a line we’ve drawn and don’t intend to cross. The only things a one-time purchase adds are Cloud Sync between your own devices and push to the browser extension.
We’d rather say that out loud than leave it as a quiet detail of the pricing page.
The principle
Two-factor authentication exists to make your accounts harder to break into. That’s safety infrastructure, and safety infrastructure that can fail you at the worst possible moment unless you’ve paid is a bad trade dressed up as a business model. The moment you lose a phone is already stressful: you’re locked out of email, banking, work accounts, sometimes all at once. Charging people at that exact moment, or only warning them about the paywall once the phone is already gone, monetizes the fear of lockout. We’d rather not build a company on that.
So the free tier isn’t a stripped-down trial meant to nudge you toward paying. It’s the complete, permanent way to keep your accounts recoverable. If you never pay us anything, you can still get your codes back, on any phone, indefinitely.
What’s free, specifically
- Offline backup and restore. Export an encrypted backup file and use it to restore every account on any device, at any time: names, icons, categories, all of it.
- Per-account QR re-scan migration. Moving to a new phone while you still have the old one in hand doesn’t need a backup file at all. Show the QR on the old device, scan it on the new one, account by account.
- Import from other authenticator apps. Bringing accounts in from Google Authenticator’s own export QR, an Aegis vault file, a 2FAS backup, or a plain list of
otpauth://links. All of it is free and built in, so switching to us doesn’t cost you anything either.
None of this requires a purchase, a trial period, or an account with us. Codes generate offline, on your device, and you don’t need an account or a phone number with us to start using the app at all.
What the one-time purchase actually adds
Cloud Sync (iCloud on iOS, Google Drive on Android) keeps your accounts up to date across every device you own, automatically, with no export-and-restore step. Browser-extension push lets you approve the Chrome or Firefox extension from your phone instead of typing codes over by hand. Both are genuinely useful, and we’re not pretending otherwise. They sit on top of a recovery story that already works without them. Paying gets you a smoother workflow across more surfaces, not a safety net you’d otherwise be missing.
It’s also a one-time purchase, not a recurring charge, and it’s tied to your store account per platform rather than to us directly.
The promise if that ever changes: Legacy Premium
We do plan to move to a subscription model eventually, and we’d rather say so plainly than have you discover it later. Here’s what we can promise now: when that happens, anyone who already bought the one-time purchase keeps everything they bought, for as long as they use the app, without ever being asked to pay again for what they already own. We call this Legacy Premium. It’s the one tier name we use besides Free, and it exists so that an early purchase can’t quietly become a worse deal later because the business model shifted underneath it.
What this rules out, in practice
Stating a principle out loud is only useful if it constrains decisions later, so here’s what it rules out concretely. We won’t ship a version where restore works but is capped at some number of accounts unless you pay, or where the backup file is fine but opening it back up requires a purchase, or where “free” quietly means “free for thirty days.” Each of those would leave a free tier technically in place while still monetizing the moment of loss, which is exactly what the principle is meant to prevent. If a proposed feature would make recovery worse, slower, or paywalled for people who haven’t bought anything, that’s a sign it needs redesigning rather than shipping with an asterisk.
It’s also why the free routes aren’t secretly worse versions of the paid ones. A restore from an offline backup file brings back the same account data, at the same fidelity, as what Cloud Sync would have kept current automatically. The difference is convenience and automation, not what you’re allowed to get back.
Why say this publicly
Plenty of apps have a free tier and a paid tier, and plenty of them are vague about exactly where the line sits until you hit it. We’d rather you know the line before you need to find it: recovery is free, forever, for everyone, and sync and browser workflow are the one-time purchase. If you’re deciding whether to trust an authenticator app with your accounts, that’s a specific claim you can hold us to.
If you want the exact free and paid boundary in one place, pricing has it. If you’re wondering what recovery actually looks like in practice, what happens when you lose your phone walks through it step by step.