There's a moment everyone knows. You need to send a file to someone — a config, a log dump, a signed PDF — and you reach for the nearest tool available. A Slack DM. A Google Drive link. An S3 bucket you'll forget to clean up. Maybe just email.

None of these are wrong exactly. But none of them were designed with disappearing in mind. That file lives on after the conversation ends, indexed in somebody's inbox or sitting in a shared drive until the heat death of the universe.

Quiet Ox is built around a different premise: the file should stop existing when it's no longer needed.

What It Does

Quiet Ox is an ephemeral file sharing service. You drop a file (or a handful of files), choose how many days it should live (1 to 14), and get back a shareable link. When the time is up — or, for email shares, an hour after the last recipient downloads it — the file is gone. Not archived, not soft-deleted. Gone.

There are no accounts to create. No dashboard to log into. No ad network tracking who's sharing what with whom. You paste the link, they download the file, and neither of you has to think about it again.

It supports up to 75 MB per transfer, handles multi-file uploads by automatically zipping them into a timestamped archive, and can share via a direct link or email notification with a one-time access code.

The Encryption Story

Here's the part worth paying attention to if you care about how this stuff actually works.

Every file is encrypted with AES-256-GCM in your browser before it leaves your machine. The encryption key is generated client-side and never transmitted to the server. Instead, it becomes the fragment portion of the share URL — the part after the # that browsers intentionally don't send in HTTP requests.

When a recipient opens the link, their browser decrypts the file locally using the key from the fragment. The server sees an encrypted blob and a file ID. It has no idea what's in it, and there's no way to recover the contents without the key.

This is sometimes called zero-knowledge encryption. The practical implication: even if the server were subpoenaed, or breached, or misbehaving, the file contents would be opaque.

A REST API for the Automation Crowd

One feature that might surprise you: Quiet Ox has a proper REST API.

curl -X POST https://quietox.com/api/v1/upload \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
  -F "[email protected]" \
  -F "lifetime=7"

The response gives you back a shareUrl (with the decryption key embedded in the fragment for human sharing), a downloadUrl for programmatic use, a decryptionKey for API-to-API workflows, and an expiresAt timestamp.

There's a full OpenAPI 3.1 spec at /api/v1/openapi.json and an AI plugin manifest at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json, which means tools like Claude and other AI assistants that support the plugin protocol can discover and use the API directly without additional configuration. The full API reference is at quietox.com/developers.

This opens up some interesting workflows: a CI pipeline that uploads an artifact and texts someone a link, an AI assistant that receives a file you share with it, a script that ships logs to a collaborator without standing up any infrastructure.

When to Reach for It

Quiet Ox isn't a replacement for cloud storage. It's not trying to be Dropbox or S3. It's the answer to a specific and very common question: how do I send this file to someone without leaving it lying around forever?

• Sharing credentials or tokens during an onboarding
• Sending a client a draft document you don't want indexed
• Passing build artifacts between pipeline stages across organizations
• Letting an AI assistant pick up a file without emailing an attachment

If that's the kind of thing you find yourself doing — and it probably is — it's worth bookmarking.

Want to integrate Quiet Ox into your tools? The full API documentation and OpenAPI spec are at quietox.com/developers.