A Termius alternative that charges once

Both applications charge for the same thing: carrying your saved connections between your machines. Everything else is free in both. So the comparison is not free against paid — it is $120 every year against $19 once.

Termius's Starter tier is genuinely usable and allowed in commercial work: SSH, SFTP, port forwarding, a local vault. Syncing is what the Pro tier adds, at $10 a month billed annually. Four years of that is $480. The same four years here cost $19, and the fourth year costs nothing because there is nothing to renew.

This is the difference that matters more than the price, and it is not a matter of one being careless. Termius encrypts on the device with Argon2id and moves the encrypted key with a modified SRP6a protocol — that is careful engineering. But their own documentation is explicit about the route: “The app syncs the encrypted key via Termius Cloud to other devices.” An account is required.

Conchshell has no cloud and no account to have one with. The vault is mirrored, encrypted, into a folder you already sync — iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a git checkout — and the second machine reads it from there. Nothing passes through us because there is no us in the path. The same design is also the limitation, stated plainly: without such a folder, only the first copy travels, by reading a code off the desktop.

Its mobile applications are in the stores, on both platforms. Ours is an APK you install from this site, on Android only — there is no iOS build yet, and nothing of ours is in a store. It has team and enterprise tiers, shared vaults, SSO, and audit trails — none of which exist here, and none of which are planned. It has a company behind it, a support organisation, and years of a track record. Conchshell is one person.

If you work in a team that needs shared credentials and an audit trail, this is not a close call and you should stay where you are. This page is for the person paying $120 a year to move their own hosts between their own two computers.

There is no remote desktop and no FTPS in Termius, on any tier. If your day includes an RDP session or an FTPS server, they are separate applications on top of the subscription. Here they are in the same window as the terminal, at no extra cost — see what costs nothing and what the $19 covers.

See what $19 covers

Is Conchshell free?

The application is free on every platform. One feature is paid: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once. There is no trial to run out and nothing that greys itself out.

Can I move my hosts over from Termius?

Connections import from a JSON bundle. Credentials do not travel in that file by design — you re-enter those once, and nothing of yours is held in a format only this application reads.

Does the $19 renew?

No. It is a purchase, not a subscription: no second payment, nothing to renew, and updates are included. The key is checked on your own machine, offline.

Is my licence tied to one computer?

No. It covers every machine you use yourself, with no seat count and no activation limit.

Why should I trust a one-person product with my SSH keys?

That is the right question to ask, and the honest answer is: judge it by what it does rather than by who wrote it. The vault design, the host-key checking and what leaves the machine are all written out on the security page, in enough detail to be argued with.