beam

Sharing a file between your own devices, or with someone standing next to you, usually means uploading it to a cloud service, waiting on it, and trusting a third party with your data in the process. Most "quick share" tools also leave a copy sitting on a server somewhere, long after you've forgotten about it.

beam moves files directly between devices over WebRTC — no file ever touches a server. Pairing is a QR scan, and up to 8 devices can join one session at once. For anything more sensitive than a file, beam also supports one-time secrets: text encrypted client-side with AES-256-GCM, with the decryption key living only in the URL fragment (never sent to the server), and an ephemeral P2P chat with media sharing for real-time conversations that leave nothing behind. The whole thing runs on vanilla JavaScript with a lightweight PHP/SQLite backend, deployed on ordinary shared hosting.

beam shipped in July 2026 and is live at beamtm.com, with the source open on GitHub under MIT. It's proof of a full build cycle — product idea to working, security-conscious software running in production — done solo, on a hosting budget most "serious" apps would consider a joke.