Email tops out at about 25MB per attachment, and the moment a file is bigger than that, most tools have the same answer: create an account, verify your email, maybe look at some ads while you're at it. All you wanted was to hand someone a file.

This post is about the ways to do that without giving anyone your email address, including the way I built.

Why does every tool want my email?

Because your email is worth more than your upload. It ties your activity to a real identity, it feeds a marketing list, and it lets the product email you later to pull you back in. The file transfer is the bait. The address book entry is the catch.

There's nothing evil about a company wanting users. But it's worth noticing that sending a file, technically speaking, requires exactly zero information about you. Any tool that demands your identity for it is making a business decision, not a technical one.

What are the usual options?

Being fair to the alternatives, because some of them are genuinely fine:

Cloud drives (Google Drive, Dropbox). They work, but both sides usually end up signed in, the file sits there forever unless you remember to clean up, and the sharing permissions are a small puzzle every time.
Transfer sites in the WeTransfer style. Built around email fields by design: yours, theirs, everyone's. The free tiers tend to come with tracking and upsells.
Peer-to-peer tools like Wormhole or croc. Clever, genuinely private, but both devices have to stay online at the same time, which is exactly the coordination problem you were trying to avoid.
Self-hosting. Full control, real effort. Great if running a server sounds like a fun weekend. Most people's weekends disagree.

How I send files

Hypastack works like this: you drop a file on the page, it gets encrypted in your browser before it leaves your device, and you get a link. You send that link over whatever channel you already use, a chat, a text, a sticky note. That's the entire flow.

The person on the other end needs nothing. No account, no app, no email, just the link. They click it, the file decrypts in their browser, done.

The free plan covers files up to 50MB with three active links at a time. Paid plans go up to 2.5GB per file, which covers video projects, design files, and most "why is this folder 2 gigabytes" situations. Large uploads get split into pieces and sent in parallel, and if your connection drops halfway, the upload resumes instead of starting over.

What happens to the file afterwards?

It deletes itself. Small files stay up for about 7 days, and the bigger the file, the shorter the window, down to 24 hours for the heaviest ones. Paid plans can set a custom lifetime, anywhere from 1 minute to 30 days. And if the file should only ever be seen once, burn after reading deletes it right after the first download.

The point is that nothing lingers. A file sharing service shouldn't slowly become an archive of everything you ever sent.

And the email part, specifically?

You never type an email anywhere on Hypastack. Not to upload, not to download, not even to create an account. Signing up means picking a nickname and letting your browser generate a key. That key is your login.

This isn't just a convenience thing. An address I never collect is an address that can't leak, can't be sold, and can't end up in a breach dump with your name on it. The easiest data to protect is the data you never ask for.

If that sounds like the way file sharing should have worked all along, try it. It's free, and nobody will email you afterwards, because nobody can.