# Public vs private apps

> Decide who can open your app: anyone on the web, or only people who sign in. How to switch, and what happens to your data either way.

Who is allowed to use your app? Vaulter gives you one clear switch for your app's users, plus a separate collaborator-only setting for work in progress. Keeping the two apart avoids most confusion about "private."

## The main switch: anyone, or sign-in required

In **Vault → Auth**, under "Who can use this app?", you choose:

- **Anyone can use it.** Visitors can open your published app and use its public pages without an account. If your app has sign-in, people create accounts when they want to. Right for landing pages, marketplaces, and anything you want the world to see.
- **Sign-in required.** Every visitor must sign in before using the app. Anyone signed out is taken to your sign-in screen first. Right for member-only products, client portals, and apps where nothing is meant to be public.

Flip it whenever you like. Like other auth settings, the change reaches your live app the next time you publish.

## The other "private": collaborators only

There is a second, different setting: project visibility. Setting your project to **collaborators only** (a paid feature) means only people who work on the project with you, signed in to their Vaulter accounts, can open the published app at all. Anyone else who is signed in but not on the project sees an access page explaining the app is private, with the option to switch accounts.

Use this one for staging and internal review, when the audience is your team rather than your app's users.

## Which one do you want?

- "My users must log in to use the app" → **Sign-in required**, in the Auth panel.
- "Only my team should be able to open this at all" → **Collaborators only** project visibility.
- "Both": an internal tool for your company can use both at once.

## What happens to your data

None of these switches expose or delete anything:

- Making an app public does not expose user data. The [per-user privacy model](/docs/data/data-privacy) still applies: signed-in users only ever see their own records. Public changes who can open the app, not who can read whose data.
- Switching from sign-in-required back to public keeps every account and every row in place. The auth foundation stays ready underneath; if you later require sign-in again, everything is still there.

> Two separate decisions, often confused: **who can open the app** (this page) and **who can see which data** ([data privacy](/docs/data/data-privacy)). Setting one does not change the other.