About
Vigilans is a Mac backup app: it lives in your menu bar, encrypts your files on your machine, and stores them in an EU object-storage bucket that belongs to you. It is built and run by one person in Vienna, Austria — not by a company with a growth target.
Who makes Vigilans
Vigilans is developed by Hannes Stiebitzhofer, a software engineer based in Vienna, operating as a sole proprietor. There is no investor, no board, and no acquisition plan — which is why the product is sold once rather than rented monthly. The legal operator details are published in full in the Impressum.
Why it exists
Backup software tends to fail in one of two ways: it is either so quiet that you never learn it stopped working, or so noisy that you turn it off. Vigilans is built around the opposite promise — it checks that your backups are actually restorable, and it only interrupts you when something genuinely needs a decision.
The second reason is ownership. Most consumer backup services keep your data on their infrastructure, in their format, on their terms. Vigilans backs up to a bucket you create and pay for directly, in a format that outlives us.
How it is built
The app is native macOS, written in Swift, and stores data as a standard restic repository. That last point matters more than it sounds: restic is free, open-source, cross-platform software, so everything Vigilans writes can be listed, verified, and restored with the restic command line — with or without a Vigilans license, forever.
- Encryption happens on your Mac; the password stays in your Keychain and never leaves the machine.
- Storage is Scaleway object storage in the EU (Paris, Amsterdam, or Warsaw), in a bucket you own.
- No telemetry, no analytics, and no account with us — the app talks to your bucket and to an update check.
- The app and this site are fully localized in English and German.
Where things stand
Vigilans is in late development and has not launched yet. It will be a one-time purchase with a perpetual license — final pricing is not published because it is not decided. Storage is billed by Scaleway directly, typically a few cents per gigabyte per month.
If you want to know when it ships, or you have a question the FAQ does not answer, write to contact@vigilans.app.