Aegis — I built an open-source secrets broker because CyberArk costs more than my salary

Let me paint you a picture. You join a company. You ask how secrets are managed. Someone looks at their shoes. Eventually you find a .env file in a shared Google Drive folder. It has been there for three years. Nobody knows who created it. It has the production database password in it. Thirteen people have access to the folder. This is not a horror story. This is Tuesday. The gap nobody is filling Secrets management has two tiers and nothing in between. Tier 1 — Enterprise: CyberArk, HashiCorp Vault (now IBM), AWS Secrets Manager. Powerful, battle-tested, and either eye-wateringly expensive or requiring a dedicated platform team to operate. CyberArk enterprise licences start at six figures. Vault OSS is free but running it reliably in production is a full-time job. Tier 2 — Nothing: Most teams under 200 people. They use .env files, CI/CD secret stores with no audit trail, or shared password managers never designed for machine-to-machine secrets. And here is the real problem: most organ