I built a local-only credential vault because every dev team I worked with stored PATs in Notepad
The Problem I Kept Seeing Over the past year working across multiple client teams on DevOps and pipeline work, I kept noticing the same thing. Developers storing GitHub PATs in Notepad. QA engineers keeping API keys in a text file on the desktop. DevOps folks with database passwords in a sticky note app. During screen shares — sprint reviews, debugging sessions, pair programming, recorded demos — those credentials were just sitting there. Visible to everyone in the call. Nobody said anything. It just kept happening. Why Existing Tools Didn't Fit I looked for something simple that solved this. Here's what I found and why none of it quite worked: Password managers (1Password, Bitwarden) Good tools. But they're built around cloud sync, browser extensions, and team sharing. For an individual developer who just wants somewhere safe to keep a PAT — overkill. Also: corporate IT policies often block installation of cloud-synced password managers on work machines. Secret managers (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager) These are infrastructure tools, not personal workflow tools. Setting up Vault for an individual developer's PAT collection is like using a forklift to move a chair. OS keystores (Windows Credential Manager, macOS Keychain) Actually decent for storage. But no UI built for this workflow, no copy-to-clipboard, and they don't solve the screen-exposure problem at all. The gap: Something simple, local, and designed around the moment of use — not just storage. So I Built Tokenly Tokenly is a local-only desktop credential vault. The core design principle is simple: Credential values are never shown on screen. You copy them to clipboard. That's the only way to use them. The clipboard auto-clears after 30 seconds. If you need to visually verify a value — press and hold a button. Release it, the value hides immediately. Not a toggle — a hold. Toggles get forgotten. Holds don't. Technical Decisions Worth Explaining Why Tauri over Electron Tauri uses the operating system's