Free tier, honestly

U2 Secured as a free password manager

U2 Secured's free plan gives one person a genuinely zero-knowledge vault for up to 500 items, at no cost, forever — not a trial. It is not the most generous free plan in this category, and this page says so before it says anything else.

If what you actually need is unlimited free storage, the honest answer is a competitor, not U2 Secured — named below, with sources. What follows is a plain account of what the free plan gives, who it is not for, and when upgrading is worth the money.

Numbers last checked

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What the free plan actually gives you

Every figure below is a real `plan_limits` value the backend enforces, not a marketing number — the same ones the pricing page reads.

  • 1 user on the workspace — free is a single-person plan, not a shared one.
  • 500 items, the vault cap for the workspace.
  • 7-day audit log — who did what to which item, kept for a week and no longer.
  • 10 public share links a month, for handing someone a single item without giving them an account.
  • No group folders on free (max_groups = 0).

Who the free plan is not for

Said plainly, because discovering a limit after relying on it is worse than reading it here first.

  • Anyone who needs to share a vault with another person. Free is 1 user and no group folders on free (max_groups = 0) — there is nobody to share a folder with on this plan.
  • Anyone over 500 items — a large personal vault, or years of accumulated logins, hits the cap before a small one does.
  • Any team. Group-based folder access needs Basic or Premium; free has none at all.
  • Anyone who wants more than 7 days of audit history, or breach monitoring, or SSO — none of those are on free at any price point below Basic or Premium.
said honestly

If unlimited free storage is what you need, go there instead

This is the concession this page exists to make. Bitwarden's and Proton Pass's free tiers are genuinely unlimited on item count — U2 Secured's is not, and pretending otherwise would not survive a reader's first login.

Bitwarden

Bitwarden's free plan is, by its own help documentation, unlimited storage of logins, notes, cards and identities, on unlimited devices, at no cost. If your only requirement is unlimited personal storage for free, Bitwarden is the better fit for that — full stop.

Visit Bitwarden

Proton Pass

Proton Pass's free plan includes, in their own words, unlimited logins, notes and credit cards, unlimited devices, and passkeys on all devices. Also genuinely unlimited on item count, from a company built around privacy the way U2 Secured is.

Visit Proton Pass

What free genuinely includes that other free tiers gate

The cap is on items and users, not on security. Free gets exactly what every paid plan gets on these three points.

  • Full client-side zero-knowledge encryption — Argon2id, then AES-256-GCM, entirely in your browser. This is not a paid add-on on any U2 Secured plan; free runs the exact same cryptography Premium does.
  • Per-surface timeout on every plan including free; the workspace-wide ceiling is basic/premium.
  • Two-factor (TOTP) codes, free and unlimited, in the separate U2 Secured Authenticator app — see below for why that is a separate product, not a missing feature.
two products, not one

Two products, not one — and the second one is free

TOTP storage is a paid feature at every competitor named on this page, verified on each of their own sites: gated behind Premium at Bitwarden, and explicitly labelled a paid feature on Proton Pass's own comparison table.

Free and unlimited, in the separate U2 Secured Authenticator app — not stored in the vault.

U2 Secured does not store TOTP seeds in the vault at all. Import detects them, lifts them out before encryption, and hands them back as otpauth:// QR codes for the separate Authenticator app. Competitors keep the password and its TOTP seed in the same vault record; U2 Secured keeps them apart, deliberately, because a password and its second factor in one store are not two factors.

That split is on every U2 Secured plan including free — it does not require upgrading the vault, and the Authenticator app itself is free to use for the codes themselves.

When upgrading is worth it, and what it costs

Upgrade when you outgrow one of the real free-plan limits above: more than 500 items, more than one person needing access, or wanting group-based folder permissions. Nothing about the cryptography changes — Basic and Premium run the same zero-knowledge encryption free already has.

Basic is $5/mo per block of 5 users ($60/yr for up to 5 users), and Premium is $9/mo per block ($108/yr for up to 5 users). Billed per block of 5 users, floor 1 — one person on a paid plan pays for a full block.

That floor matters most if you are a single person upgrading just for the higher item cap or the longer audit-log window: you pay for a full 5-user block whether or not anyone else ever joins. The full pricing breakdown, including the block ladder at larger workspace sizes, is on the pricing page.

  • You've reached 500 items and need more room.
  • You want to add a second person, or a group, to your workspace — free is 1 user with no group folders on free (max_groups = 0).
  • You want more than 7 days of audit history, breach monitoring, or SSO.

Said out loud, not left for you to discover

  • Bitwarden's and Proton Pass's free tiers are genuinely unlimited on item count. U2 Secured's free tier is capped at 500 items. That is a real limit, not a technicality.
  • Billed per block of 5 users, floor 1 — one person on a paid plan pays for a full block.
  • No group folders on free (max_groups = 0).
  • U2 Secured is a new product with no published third-party security audit yet.

Questions people actually ask

Is U2 Secured's free plan actually unlimited?
No. It is capped at 500 items for 1 user, with no group folders on free (max_groups = 0). Bitwarden's and Proton Pass's free tiers are genuinely unlimited on item count — if that is what you need, use one of those instead.
Does U2 Secured's free plan include two-factor (TOTP) codes?
Free and unlimited, in the separate U2 Secured Authenticator app — not stored in the vault. Bitwarden and Proton Pass both gate their integrated authenticator behind a paid plan; U2 Secured's Authenticator is free on every tier, including free.
Is the free plan's encryption weaker than the paid plans'?
No — every U2 Secured plan uses the same client-side Argon2id-to-AES-256-GCM encryption. Free does not get a lesser cipher; it gets fewer items, one user, and a shorter audit log.
Can I share my free vault with my partner or a group?
No — free is 1 user and no group folders on free (max_groups = 0), so there is nobody to share a folder with on this plan. Group-based folder sharing needs Basic or Premium.
What happens if I go over 500 items on free?
New items are refused until you delete something or upgrade — nothing already in the vault is deleted automatically. Basic raises the cap to 1,000 items and Premium to 10,000 items.

Sources for the competitor figures

Every competitor figure above was read directly from the vendor's own site on the date shown. Free tiers change from time to time; if something has changed, their own pages are the authority and this page is out of date.

See it for yourself

Create a free U2 Secured workspace in a couple of minutes — or go straight to Bitwarden or Proton Pass if unlimited free storage is what you actually need.

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