Kept every secret in a .env file until a near miss at 2am made me switch to a vault
For two years I just dropped API keys straight into .env files and hoped nobody pushed one to GitHub, which worked fine until a teammate almost committed our prod Stripe key on a Friday night. Now every secret lives in HashiCorp Vault and the app pulls them at boot, and honestly the audit log alone was worth the setup pain. Anyone else make that jump, and did you go with Vault or something like AWS Secrets Manager instead?