Opportunities › Access control for multi-user AI agents › Proposed app
Keyhand
Per-user access control and audit trails for AI agents calling your APIs
- Score
- 42
- confidence 59
- Evidence
- 8
- items on the page
- Rivals
- 1
- named in sources
- First version
- 45 d
- estimate
- Type
- Desktop app
- PWA: runs in the browser, installs on Mac and Windows
- Market since
- 2024
- New market · AI estimate
ScreensConcept
Desktop app: Developers and compliance teams write policies, review audit logs, and manage credentials in controlled environments requiring dense dashboards and detailed rules. Sample screens on a computer, in the proposed brand. Their numbers are sample data.
Activity
Calls today1,284
About this appAI proposal
Keyhand sits between your AI agent and the systems it calls, such as a CRM, billing or payroll tool. Each request is made with the credentials of the person the agent is acting for, not a shared key. Policies you write decide what that person's agent may do.
Every call is logged with who asked, what the agent did, which policy allowed or blocked it, and the result. Teams in regulated work such as finance, healthcare and defense can export these records for reviewers instead of building custom auth and logging themselves.
It is for developers shipping internal agents in Slack or other chat tools. You change the base URL, connect each user once, and write rules in plain files kept in version control.
- Tagline
- Every agent action, tied to the person behind it.
- Voice
- PreciseCalmDirect
- Why this name
- A key in a hand: the agent borrows each person's own access instead of holding one master key. Two plain words joined, easy to say.
In the first version
Members say which features they would use. It tells PWAS what people want; it changes no score.
Per-user credential vault
Each user connects their own accounts once. The proxy swaps in their token on every call, so the agent never holds a shared key.
No member yet
Runtime policy rules
Allow, deny or require approval by user, role, endpoint, method or field. Rules live in versioned files and apply on the next request.
No member yet
Attributed audit log
Every action records the user, agent, target API, policy decision and outcome. Search it and export it as CSV or JSON.
No member yet
Approval for risky actions
Hold sensitive calls, like payouts or deletes, until the user or a manager approves in the chat where the agent runs.
No member yet
Brand identityAI proposal
Check the name against trademark registers before using it.
Palette
#0F4C5CDeep Teal · primary#F6F3ECPaper · surface#1B2528Ink · text#D9A441Brass · accent#B3392FSignal Red · deny status#4C7A4FMoss · allow status
Typography
Aa
Keyhand
PricingAI proposal
The material says a competitor, Alter, uses usage-based pricing with a free tier up to 10k requests (a public claim). It gives no paid prices; the Team and Regulated tiers are starting points to test.
Free
Free
- Up to 10k requests per month
- Per-user credentials
- Policy rules
- 7-day audit log
Team
$99 a month
- Up to 500k requests per month
- Approvals in chat
- 90-day audit log
- Audit export
Regulated
$499 a month
- Up to 5M requests per month
- 1-year audit retention
- Policy dry run
- SSO
What it could be worthEstimate
What a software business making this much sells for today, from real deals. Pick a monthly revenue.
If it makes
Worth about
$194,000
Sale range $132,000 to $263,000
$120,000 a year in revenue
From 87 software businesses listed and sold on Empire Flippers in the last year, revenue vetted by the broker: they sell for about 19× their monthly revenue, most between 13× and 26×.
Measured on profit, the middle deal is 32× monthly net profit: about 2.7 years of profit.
An estimate, not an offer or financial advice. A real price depends on profit, growth, churn, how much of the work is the owner's, and the buyer.
How it would growAI proposal
How the product would reach new customers through its own use, and how the first ones would be found. A plan to test, not a result.
- Built-in loop
- Partners and integrations. Publish connectors and guides for popular agent frameworks and chat-bot tools. Developers find Keyhand when they search for how to give an agent per-user access to a CRM or billing tool.
- Do they become customers?
- People reached are the developers who install it, and they can pay once traffic passes the free tier. Test whether free-tier teams in regulated companies move to paid plans.
- First customers
- Engineering teams of 5 to 50 developers at fintech companies building internal Slack agents that touch CRM, billing or payroll systems.
- Where to reach them
- Hacker News and dev forums: Post a technical write-up on per-user agent auth and join threads where developers describe sharing keys.
- Fintech engineering communities: Offer to set up a pilot for teams with audit requirements and ask for their policy needs.
- Open-source example repos: Publish a sample Slack agent with per-user policies that people can fork and run.
- First milestone
- Five fintech teams run a real agent through Keyhand and two of them pay for the Team tier within 60 days.
Why people already pay for this
- VerifiedHacker News post received 58 points and 25 comments
- Public claimDevelopers building multi-user agents lack proper access control, forcing them to either share credentials or build custom auth.
- AI inferenceBuilding custom auth for multi-tenant agents is prohibitively expensive in regulated industries like financial services.
- Public claimMultiple startups are already using Alter to build secure internal agents for SRE, back office, and compliance use cases.
- Public claim
Tech stack
Every proposal builds on the same PWA base, installable from the browser on any phone or computer. Dashed boxes are what this app adds.
- AppNext.js and TypeScript
- PWAManifest and service worker
- UITailwind CSS
- Data and authSupabase Postgres
- PaymentsStripe
- EmailResend
- HostingVercel
- This app · Secrets storageEncrypted secret store with managed keys (KMS)User OAuth tokens and API keys need envelope encryption and rotation beyond plain database columns.
- This app · Proxy runtimeLow-latency edge or container proxy serviceThe proxy sits in every agent call path, so it needs fast, streaming-capable request forwarding.
RisksAI inference
- CommercialA competitor, Alter, already sells this with a free tier (public claim). Keyhand must find a narrower wedge, such as a certain regulated vertical, to win.
- TechnicalBeing in every call path adds latency and a single point of failure. Downtime would stop customers' agents.
- RegulatoryFinance, healthcare and defense buyers may require certifications and self-hosted or air-gapped options that a small team cannot offer at first.
- DataStoring user tokens for many downstream systems makes Keyhand a high-value target. A breach would be severe.
- PlatformEach downstream API has its own OAuth and scope model. Supporting many of them takes ongoing integration work.
Everything marked AI proposal or AI inference was written by a model from the evidence on the opportunity page. The proposed name must be checked against trademark registers before it is used.