v0.1.0-alpha.2 · private beta opening

Share files privately.
No email. No password. No cloud drive.

Your own PC becomes your private cloud. Share a folder with a friend — or reach your own devices from anywhere — and they browse, download, or stream straight from your machine. End-to-end encrypted and peer-to-peer, so your files never sit on anyone else’s server, and there’s no monthly bill.

Download for Windows See it work
macOS & Linux — coming soon
0clicks
to share a folder
$0
monthly bill, ever
0%
on your PC
Bifrost — Sending to Emily
SM
You
Sender
Encrypted
E
Emily
Recipient
Tahoe-trip-2026.zip
2.4 GB · 284 files
Sending
1.74 GB of 2.40 GB
12.4 MB/s
48s
73%
Encrypted Direct Fastest path
Why Bifrost

Built around the things you actually care about.

In plain terms: Bifrost privately shares and streams files straight from your own PC — to a friend you approve, or to your own other devices. It’s not a public torrent swarm, and it never uploads your files to a cloud. Three things make it different:

No email. No password.

Open the app, pick a username, you’re in. Your identity is a key generated on your machine — no email, no password, no “forgot password” loop. The key never leaves your device.

End-to-end encrypted.

The Noise protocol wraps every byte between your PC and theirs. The relay forwards ciphertext only — never sees a filename, never reads a chunk. The lock on every transfer isn’t decoration; it’s a guarantee.

Files stay on your PC.

Your files never live in the cloud. You share access to a folder; your friend browses and downloads in real time. Close the app and they’re gone from the network — originals never moved.

The 3-click promise

Three clicks. Or it’s the wrong design.

Watch it happen. Cursor traces the entire share flow — pick folder, pick person, done. Hover to pause.

Files
Tahoe Trip 2026
284 files · 2.4 GB
Work Documents
47 files · 186 MB
1
Click “Share”
Choose people
E
Emily (Mom)
@emily · Online
M
Mike
@mike · Online
S
Sarah
@sarah · Online
2
Tap a friend
Almost done
Tahoe Trip 2026
→ Emily
3
Done
A glimpse of the app

Every screen, real and breathing.

Click a tab below to swap between flows — a faithful re-creation of the app’s screens, rebuilt for this page.

Bifrost — Sending to Emily
Sending to Emily
Direct connection · end-to-end encrypted
SS
You
A
Emily
Tahoe-trip-2026.zip
2.4 GB · 284 files
Sending
1.74 GB / 2.40 GB
12.4 MB/s
73%
Encrypted Direct Fastest Verified

Share a folder

Step 2 of 3 — choose who can see it
Tahoe Trip 2026
284 files · 2.4 GB
E
Emily (Mom)
@emily · Online
M
Mike (Dad)
@mike · Online
S
Sarah
@sarah · Online
People
7 friends · 3 online now
Online
A
Emily (Mom)
@emily
Online · 3 shared
V
Mike
@mike
Online · 1 shared
P
Sarah
@sarah · LAN
Online · 5 shared
Tahoe Trip 2026 / Day 2 — Beach
beach-walk.jpg
12 MB
2 days
Open
sunset-clip.mp4
186 MB
2 days
Play
palm-grove.jpg
8.1 MB
2 days
Open
dolphin-tour.mp4
420 MB
2 days
Play
itinerary.pdf
240 KB
4 days
Open
cocktails.jpg
6.4 MB
2 days
Open
Good afternoon, Sarah
2 new things since you were away
Emily shared Family Reunion 2026 with you
just now · 28 videos · 4.2 GB
Rohan accepted your friend request
2 hours ago
Settings
Five sections, by intention
Theme
Pick one that suits your day
Day
Light
Dark
Reduce motion
Honours system preference by default
Save downloads to
D:\Bifrost\
Stream, don’t shuttle

Their library, playing on your screen.

Don’t download a folder to see what’s inside. Open a friend’s share, flip it into Cinema, Music or Books mode, and press play — it streams over the same encrypted bridge.

Cinema

Every video across the share, laid out as a poster wall. Click one — it buffers, plays, and never lands in your cloud.

Music

Albums and playlists straight off your friend’s disk, with a proper track list and inline player.

01Midnight Drive.flac4:12
Monsoon Season.mp33:47
03Paper Lanterns.flac5:03
04Last Local Home.mp32:58

Books

Browse your friend’s bookshelf like it’s on the same desk — PDFs open right in the app; other formats download and open in your usual reader.

PDFEPUBMOBIAZW

Streams land in a bounded local cache (10 GB, oldest evicted first) so replays start instantly — download anything you want to keep for good.

Under the hood

A direct line. With a fallback when your network can’t help.

Real internet means real NATs and real firewalls. Bifrost climbs a four-rung ladder to land the fastest possible path.

SS
You
Sender
Encrypted
A
Emily
Recipient
Relay — fallback only, forwards ciphertext
01

Discovery

Add a friend by @username, QR scan, or peer ID. Then the DHT (and mDNS on your LAN) finds their circuit — peers on different relays still find each other.

02

Initial relay path

First connection rides the relay as a fallback. The relay only forwards encrypted bytes — it never sees filenames or content.

03

Hole-punch upgrade

DCUTR coordinates a simultaneous dial from both sides. When it works (cone NATs — most home networks), the relay drops and you go direct.

04

Fallback that just works

If your NAT won’t allow hole-punching, the relay keeps forwarding. Transfers complete either way — Bifrost tells you which path you’re on, in plain English.

Power users

The whole app, in your terminal.

Same daemon, second face. Every click in the desktop app has a command — script it, cron it, run it headless on a NAS.

The CLI ships alongside the beta builds for Windows, macOS & Linux — the demo above is what it feels like.

One daemon, two faces

The CLI drives the exact engine behind the desktop app. Share from the terminal, watch it appear in the UI — and vice versa.

Full parity, audited

Every desktop action has a command. An automated parity audit keeps the two surfaces honest — no second-class citizen.

Built for pipes

--json on every command, clean exit codes, fuzzy pickers. Cron a nightly bifrost get and your friend’s folder backs itself up.

One-shot send codes

bifrost send file.mp4 prints a three-word code. They type it, the file flies — no friendship required, expires in 24 h.

The honest comparison

Why not just use a cloud drive?

Because you already own the storage. You’re paying rent to put your files on someone else’s computer — then paying again with your privacy.

Bifrost Cloud drives Link services USB stick
Setup ✓Install, pick a folder, done Account, sync client, upload Upload, wait, paste link Find it, walk it over
Send a 40 GB folder ✓Direct, at line speed Hours of upload + quota errors Size caps, expiring links Sneakernet latency
Files live on ✓Your machines only Their datacenter Their datacenter Whoever holds it
Monthly bill ✓$0 — it’s your hardware $10–20 per TB, forever Free tier, then paywall One-time, easily lost
Privacy ✓End-to-end, keys never leave Provider can scan content Anyone with the link Unencrypted by default

Most transfers connect peer-to-peer directly. The rest fall back to our relay — which forwards ciphertext it cannot read.

Project status

Where we are right now v0.1.0-alpha.2

Last shipped 2026-05-24. Private beta opens next.

Live
Core P2P + chunked transfers
Live
DCUTR hole-punching + relay fallback
Live
Resumable folder downloads
Live
Windows desktop
Live
@usernames + QR peer IDs
Live
Cinema · Music · Books modes
Live
Any-format video streaming
Live
Identity in OS keychain
Live
Auto-updates
In progress
macOS desktop
In progress
Linux builds (AppImage/deb)
In progress
Sentry crash reports
Questions, answered straight

The things everyone asks first.

For the transfer itself, yes — that’s what makes it private; there’s no middleman holding your files. But transfers are chunked and resumable: if either side disconnects mid-download, Bifrost picks up exactly where it left off the next time you’re both on.

For your files: ciphertext, nothing else. Most connections hole-punch straight through NAT and never touch a relay. When a relay is needed, it forwards bytes that are end-to-end encrypted with keys that exist only on your two devices — it can’t read filenames or file contents. Like any coordination server, it does handle the public directory (usernames) and presence; the details are in our privacy policy.

No. Bifrost isn’t a public swarm — there’s no global tracker or open DHT where anyone can watch you. You connect only to friends you’ve explicitly trusted, and only they ever see your address.

No. Torrents spread one file across a public swarm of strangers who each hold pieces of it. Bifrost has no swarm and no strangers: it’s a private, direct connection between your own devices and the specific friends you approve. Nobody else can discover you, request your files, or carry pieces of them. Same broad idea — peers talking directly — but the opposite privacy model.

They’re genuinely good — if you like running them. Nextcloud is a server you host and maintain; Tailscale is a VPN you both install and configure; Syncthing mirrors whole folders onto every device. Bifrost is for the person who wants none of that: no server to run, no VPN to join, no account to create. You add a friend by @username and share a folder — they browse and stream it right from your PC. The trade-off is honest: those tools give you more control and always-on access; Bifrost gives you the shortest path from “I have a file” to “my friend is watching it,” with nothing to set up.

Free to use — no paid tiers, no ads, and we don’t take payments, donations, or sponsorships. On the code: Bifrost is proprietary and closed-source, released under a proprietary license — that’s the model, not a temporary state. What you can still verify is the security foundation: the encryption isn’t homemade — it’s libp2p’s Noise protocol, the same widely-used standard other privacy tools are built on.

The Windows desktop app is what testers run today. macOS is being brought up right now, and a Linux AppImage already runs in internal testing — both ship to beta testers as they’re verified. A full CLI ships alongside the beta builds. Mobile comes later.

Search their @username or paste their peer ID — and in person, they can show you a QR code of their ID to copy. Both sides confirm — nobody gets added to your network without a handshake.

Stop uploading your private life to someone else’s server.

Bifrost is heading into private beta. Installers go to invited testers first — request early access below and we’ll email you an invite as spots open.

Download for your platform