Why I built SecretStash

Doug Niccum builds developer tools through Doug Niccum Design, LLC, the software company behind SecretStash.

When Doug onboarded at Henry Schein One this past January, one of the most stressful parts of the first few days wasn't the people or the process—it was configuring a new development environment without the database backups, API keys, and SSL certificates it depended on. Like most engineers, he'd relied on Slack and Teams to pass sensitive values between teammates, and knew it wasn't right, even when it felt quick.

The data backed up the gut feeling: GitGuardian has found that incidents in collaboration tools like Slack, Jira, and Confluence are more likely to be rated highly critical than incidents in source code, and a growing share of leaks now start outside the codebase entirely.

Existing options didn't fit either. AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault took too long to set up for a small team. Self-hosted, open-source tools risked being abandoned. Enterprise secrets platforms were priced and built for organizations much larger than his.

So he built SecretStash—a CLI-first tool that lets developers store, share, and sync environment variables with client-side encryption, without the setup overhead of enterprise tooling. It's the tool he wished he'd had on day one.