Retreat.technology

Retreat.technology locks you out of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever you need a break from. It acts as a timed safe, securely locking your passwords away for a set period of time, encouraging users to reconnect to themselves, and spend time away from their screens.

The tool stores passwords to people’s public identities, so a highly-secure solution was needed, and despite password managers being available everywhere, people don’t use them or understand them, so a simple solution was needed too.

Retreat uses one Argon2id-hashed password for both account access and vault encryption. The user password is hashed twice using this algorithm, using the first hash to derive the Data Encryption Key for the vault. The double hash is stored to authenticate when logging in and locking vaults. This ensures that no passwords are stored in plain text. It was built with TypeScript, React, and Next.js, running entirely serverless on Vercel Functions.

I launched this on January 1st, 2024, with over 200 users in the first month, receiving positive feedback and feature requests for browser plugins, timed access, and Passkey support. A SwiftUI iOS app is in development for release in 2025.