The storage bill
PV's pricing tells you what kind of product it is. Alongside a monthly, yearly and permanent membership, there are separate cloud storage add-ons priced by capacity — 20GB and 100GB tiers, billed yearly.
That is a reasonable business if what you want is your photos available everywhere. It also means your files live on someone else's infrastructure, and the cost grows with how much you keep.
Vaultine has no company cloud and nothing priced by the gigabyte. Files are encrypted on your device and stay there. If you want a backup, it goes to a Dropbox account you already own, encrypted before it leaves the device, so Dropbox stores something it cannot read and neither can we.
Fake password, and the thing after it
PV's listing describes a fake password, which is a genuinely useful feature and more than most of this category offers. Show one code, see a harmless set of files.
Vaultine's Decoy Vault does the same thing and lets you decide in advance exactly what it contains. The Duress Vault is the part that has no equivalent here: a third code opens an empty vault and wipes your real vaults as it does, for the situation where the files must not survive rather than simply stay hidden.
Because Vaultine rejects any code it does not recognise, the vaults on your device are exactly the ones you created — nothing appears that you did not make.
Ads
Ad removal is something PV sells. That is a common model and an honest one, but it does mean the free tier of a privacy app is funded by advertising, and ads are the second most common theme in its recent negative reviews.
Vaultine carries no ads on any tier. The free version is limited by capacity — one vault, up to 10 files — not by interruptions.
One vault, four platforms
PV is a phone app with Wi-Fi transfer to a computer. Vaultine runs natively on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, so the documents on your laptop get the same encrypted vault as the photos on your phone.
