I send files to friends a lot, and every service wants the same thing: upload it to their server first, wait, then the other person downloads it. With big files on a slow connection that means moving the same bytes twice, plus the file sits on someone else's computer for a while.
So I built ZeroServer. It is one HTML page. You open it, drop your files, and you get a link and a QR code. Whoever opens the link connects straight to your browser, and the files travel directly between the two browsers. There is no upload step, because there is no server to upload to.
A few details I cared about:
- Every file gets a SHA-256 hash computed while it streams, and both sides see it, so the receiver can be sure the file arrived exactly as it was sent.
- If a connection cannot get through a strict network directly, it can fall back to a relay, but the normal path is straight browser to browser.
- Nothing is stored anywhere. If I close my tab, the link dies. That is the honest trade-off: I have to stay on the page while the other side downloads. It is a live handoff tool, not cloud storage.
- It works in a phone browser too, which is where I tested it most. Sending a photo between two browsers on my phone took under a second on the same network.
Try it: https://ptraaah.github.io/zeroserver/
Code: https://github.com/Ptraaah/zeroserver
It is free, no accounts, no ads. That is not a launch offer, it is just how it works, since there is nothing for me to pay for either. If it saves you some pain and you feel like chipping in, there are support links on the page, but using it is the main thing.
If you try it between two different networks, one phone on mobile data and one on WiFi for example, I would genuinely love to hear how it went. That is the case I am still collecting results on.
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