Boxcryptor

» see boxcryptor.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Boxcryptor began as a private fix. Andrea Pfundmeier and Robert Freudenreich wanted to keep files in Dropbox without handing Dropbox the contents, so they wrote something that encrypted each file on their own machines before it synced. On 5 August 2011 they posted it in Dropbox's user forum. It was downloaded more than a thousand times that first week, which is how a helper tool turns into a company.

Secomba GmbH was founded in Augsburg the same year around the thing. Boxcryptor mounted a virtual drive and encrypted file by file with AES-256, wrapping the keys with RSA-4096. The ciphertext sat in whatever folder your cloud provider was already watching, and because the unit was a file rather than a container, syncing stayed cheap: change one document and one document went up the wire.

That design made it provider-agnostic, which was the commercial point. Dropbox and Google Drive were supported directly alongside OneDrive, and anything speaking WebDAV worked by default. It was free for personal use on a couple of devices and paid for business, and by the early 2020s Secomba had customers in more than 190 countries and over thirty employees. The German Founders Award went to it in 2014.

On 29 November 2022 Secomba announced it had sold Boxcryptor to Dropbox. New private signups closed immediately. Existing subscriptions were honored to the end of their contracts, which stretched the wind-down across three more years, and on 31 December 2025 Secomba GmbH i.L. ceased all operational activity. Boxcryptor stopped with it.

~ the record ~

~ the thing it was built against ~

The pitch turned on one question: where does the key live. Dropbox encrypts what it stores and Dropbox holds the key, which means the contents are readable by the company and by anyone who can compel the company. Boxcryptor moved the key onto your laptop, so the provider was left holding a blob it could not open.

It is a small idea with a wide reach, and it landed on a specific audience. German lawyers and medical practices were legally obliged to keep client files confidential and wanted the convenience of a cloud folder anyway. Boxcryptor let them have both without ever having to argue about where a US company's servers sat.

~ what dropbox bought ~

Dropbox did not buy Secomba GmbH. It bought the technology and the intellectual property behind Boxcryptor and left the company holding a product it was no longer allowed to sell to new customers. The plan was to build end-to-end encryption natively into Dropbox for paying business users, which is roughly what Boxcryptor had been doing from the outside for eleven years.

A tool whose entire reason for existing was that you should not have to trust your cloud provider was sold to the cloud provider. Users who wanted a provider-agnostic lockbox got three years of notice and a list of alternatives to migrate to. What is left at boxcryptor.com is a single white card on a soft background, headed Goodbye, carrying one line: as of December 31, 2025, Secomba GmbH i.L. has ceased all operational activities.

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