Sending files without an account: what you get and what you give up

Sometimes you need to hand one file to one person and never think about it again. Making an account for that is disproportionate, and it is worth knowing that you do not have to.

Here is how anonymous transfers work, what you give up, and when the trade is worth making in the other direction.

The whole flow

No sign-up, no email address, no confirmation step:

1. Drop the file onto the home page.
2. Pick how long the link should live — a day or a week.
3. Copy the link, or show the QR code to someone standing next to you.

The recipient clicks and downloads. They do not need an account either, which is the part that makes this usable with people outside your own organisation.

The cap without an account is 100 MB per transfer, up to ten files at once. That covers documents, a set of photos, a slide deck, a compressed project folder — most of what people actually need to hand over in a hurry.

It is still encrypted

Anonymous does not mean unprotected. Encryption is on by default whether or not you have an account: the file is sealed in your browser before it uploads, with a key that travels in the part of the link after the #, which browsers never send to a server.

So a transfer sent by a stranger with no account is still one we cannot read. That is a property of how the sealing works, not a feature reserved for paying users.

The filename is sealed too, which matters more than it sounds — a name is often the most revealing part of a file.

What you give up

Being clear about this is the point of the article. Without an account:

• No record. There is no dashboard listing what you sent. Lose the link and there is no way to find it again — including for us.
• No revocation. This is the big one. If you send it to the wrong person, you cannot kill the link; you can only wait for the expiry. That is why the anonymous windows are short.
• No download counts. You will not know whether it arrived.
• We cannot mail the link for you. That requires an account, because sending mail on behalf of an anonymous stranger is a spam machine.
• Shorter lifetimes. A day or a week, not a month.
• Smaller files. 100 MB rather than 1 GB or 10 GB.

None of these are artificial gates so much as consequences of there being no identity attached to the transfer. A revoke button needs to know who is allowed to press it.

When anonymous is the right answer

• A one-off hand-off to someone you are talking to right now.
• Passing a file between your own devices — phone to laptop is a QR code away.
• Sending from a machine that is not yours, where signing in would leave a session behind.
• Anything where creating an account is more effort than the file is worth, which is most things.

When to take the free account instead

A free account costs an email address and a six-digit code — there is no password to invent — and it changes the shape of what you can do:

• 1 GB per transfer instead of 100 MB, with 10 GB of storage.
• Links that last up to 30 days.
• A dashboard showing what you have sent and how many times each was downloaded.
• Revoke any link instantly, which is the single most useful thing an account buys.
• We mail the link for you to one person, with delivery and open receipts.

The practical rule: if the file matters enough that sending it to the wrong person would be a problem, you want the revoke button, and that means an account.

The privacy question

A fair thing to ask: what does an anonymous transfer leave behind?

The transfer row itself — a random slug, the size, the expiry, a download count — plus the sealed bytes, until the expiry deletes them. No account, no email address, no name. The privacy policy states it exactly, including what is kept afterwards as a record and for how long.

What we cannot do is read the contents of an encrypted transfer, with or without an account. That is the same either way.

The short version

For a quick hand-off under 100 MB, no account is the right answer and the file is still sealed before it leaves your machine. The moment you want to take a link back, know whether it arrived, or send something larger, the free account is worth the sixty seconds.

Related: how to send large files, how long a link should last, and the plans.