All of this has happened to somebody already, usually in the first ten minutes. Almost none of it means your Vault is broken.
Nine times out of ten this is the cable or the plug, not the Vault. USB-C cables look identical and absolutely are not: plenty of them ship with lamps and earbuds and carry barely enough power to blink at you.
1. Plug it into a normal phone charger. Any ordinary Android or iPhone adapter is perfect. Skip USB hubs that don't have their own power.
2. Swap the cable — yes, even the one that charges your phone perfectly well. Use the one in the box if you still have it.
3. Change both. This is the one people miss. A cable that behaves with one adapter can sulk with another, so if your first pairing does nothing, change the pair.
4. Still nothing? Try a computer's USB port directly, not through a hub.
Give it about five seconds to wake up. If it stays dark with a phone charger and a known-good cable, stop there and talk to us — that one's on the hardware, not on you.
All of them. That's not a glitch, it's a slideshow. Your Vault cycles through three codes every few seconds because it has three different things to offer you.
| “Scan to join Wi-Fi” | Connects your phone to the Vault. Start here. |
| “then open vault.local” | The address to open once you're connected. |
| “Your manual and help” | Brings you to this website. |
Your Vault has a touch screen, so you don't have to wait for the right one to come round: swipe left or right and it'll hold still. The dots along the bottom tell you how many there are and which one you're looking at.
You don't. That's the good news. There is no app, no account, no sign-up, nothing to download. The Vault serves its own setup page, from the device itself, over its own Wi-Fi.
Join the Vault's Wi-Fi with the code on its screen, open http://192.168.4.1, follow the setup. That's the entire installation, and you're already halfway through it.
Good. That means it's working. Your Vault has no internet connection and never will — that's the whole reason your passwords aren't sitting on somebody's server, ours included. While your phone is talking to the Vault, it isn't talking to the internet.
Read these instructions on something else — a laptop, a tablet, a second phone. Otherwise the page you're following vanishes at the exact moment you need it, which is a special kind of annoying.
Your phone goes back to normal the second you rejoin your home Wi-Fi or switch mobile data on.
Four things, quickest first:
1. Type http://192.168.4.1 instead of vault.local. The numbers always work; the friendly name depends on your phone's mood.
2. Check it says http:// and not https://.
3. Turn mobile data off for a minute. Some phones quietly decide a Wi-Fi network with no internet must be a mistake and route around it.
4. Check you're still connected. Phones sometimes wander back to your home Wi-Fi without mentioning it.
Yes. It's going to be insistent about this, and we're not sorry.
We cannot open your vault, and we cannot recover it for you. There's no account, no backup on our side, no “forgot password” link — because there's nothing of yours anywhere but that device. Your recovery words are the only spare key that exists, and the Vault checks you actually wrote them down by asking for a few of them back.
Two minutes now. Genuinely the most valuable two minutes you'll spend with it.
| Amber, padlock shut | Not set up yet. Waiting for you. |
| Red, padlock shut | Locked. Needs your passphrase. |
| Green, padlock open | Open for business. |
The padlock changes shape as well as colour, so it still reads correctly if red and green look the same to you.
BendFlex® Vault · Help · touch-screen Vault · last updated 27 August 2026