AmberKey signs you in with passkeys — the same technology your phone or laptop uses for Face ID and fingerprint unlock. There’s no password to steal and no password to reset. That’s a deliberate security choice, and it has one consequence worth understanding up front: if you lose every way to sign in, we cannot let you back in. No support agent can override it, because we have no secret that would.

The good news is that this is entirely preventable, and even in the worst case your plan itself is not lost.

Prevent lockout: enrol a second way in

Do this once, today. In Settings → Signing in:

1. Add a second passkey on a different device — your phone and your laptop, or a hardware security key you keep in a drawer. Now losing one device is a non-event: you sign in from the other and add a replacement.
2. Or set up a backup code app (an authenticator like Google Authenticator or 1Password). It’s a second, independent way to sign in if a passkey isn’t available.

If you only have one passkey and no backup, AmberKey will warn you on the Settings page. Please don’t ignore it — a single point of failure for your sign-in is the one thing that turns a lost phone into a lost account.

If you’ve already lost access

If you can still sign in on any enrolled device, do it now and add another passkey immediately (see above). If you have a backup authenticator code, use “sign in with a code instead” on the sign-in screen.

If you have genuinely lost every way in, the account itself can’t be recovered — but here’s what is not lost, and why AmberKey is built this way:

• Your recovery cards still work. The whole point of AmberKey is that your vault is recoverable from your circle’s printed cards plus a backup file, entirely offline, with no account and no company involved. Losing your login does not touch that path at all.
• Your family is unaffected. The people you chose can still recover your vault exactly as designed. Your own sign-in is only for managing the plan, not for the recovery your family will actually use.

So the practical steps are: keep a spare passkey or a backup code, and keep an exported backup file somewhere your household can find (see the family backup). With those two habits, neither a lost phone nor a lost password can ever cost you anything.

Why we don’t offer a password reset

A “reset my account” button is a master key — and a master key is exactly what a blind, end-to-end-encrypted system must never have, because anyone who compels or steals it defeats the whole design. We’d rather ask you to keep a spare key than build a backdoor that could be turned against you. See our security page for the full reasoning.