Cloudflare Drop

(cloudflare.com)

410 points | by coloneltcb 13 hours ago

59 comments

  • karlkloss 2 hours ago
    Does nobody read the fineprint?

    By submitting, posting, or publishing your content, suggestions, enhancement requests, recommendations, feedback, information, data, or comments (“Content”) to any Website or Online Service, you are granting Cloudflare a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free right and license (with the right to sublicense) to use, incorporate, exploit, display, perform, reproduce, distribute, and prepare derivative works of your Content.

    If you're ok with that, fine. But I'm not.

    • thelibrarian 2 hours ago
      If you don’t give them a license to display the works you give them to display, how can they legally display it?
      • gpt5 1 hour ago
        Perhaps the same way that Github works when you host your web page there. I.e. A revocable, limited license, where you retain full ownership, and only grant them permission to host and serve your content + a limited set of other uses, and you dictate external licensing?
      • tritiy 1 hour ago
        It states more than just display: 'to use, incorporate, exploit, display, perform, reproduce, distribute, and prepare derivative works'
        • PurpleRamen 48 minutes ago
          Can this be a necessary legal framing for technical purposes, to allow converting of pictures to different resolutions, or adapt the content to mobile views, and such things?
      • yread 7 minutes ago
        With the right to sublicense. They can literally sell your stuff
      • dminik 1 hour ago
        Perpetual and irrevocable? And with the right to modify, not just display?

        You do not need all that.

      • simonjgreen 1 hour ago
        Perpetual and irrevocable? Derivative works?
        • flyingshelf 12 minutes ago
          Derivative could just be "let CF append your Google Analytics tag and that funny cursor-follower script.

          Perpetual is way harder to justify though.

    • aweb 44 minutes ago
      I'm always really doubtful this is applicable in the end, especially in the EU. You can't give up all your copyright like this
      • jwr 38 minutes ago
        You can't give up the right to sign your work with your name. But you can definitely share rights to reproduce your work etc — although perhaps not in a clickable EULA.
      • tjoff 29 minutes ago
        Regardless, I'm not one to use or otherwise promote such shitty behavior.

        Not sure why cloudflare seems to be in such good standing on hn.

    • vinothkumarnaga 2 hours ago
      Thank you for highlighting this :)
    • harrouet 2 hours ago
      You beat me to it, I was going to post the same.

      Clear red flag, only useful for whistleblowers.

    • sevenzero 2 hours ago
      People are losing the ability to read. Lots of high schoolers are incapable of reading properly already. Attention spans shrink. We got some fun times ahead of us.

      We need these legal texts as short form TikTok content I am afraid.

      • gmac 1 hour ago
        I have plenty of ability to read, but I never read these T&Cs because they’re usually dozens of pages long and life’s too short (or, if you prefer, the cost/benefit doesn’t support it). For consumers in Europe, at least, it’s usually safe to assume that anything too shitty is unenforceable, which helps.
        • lenkite 11 minutes ago
          A good idea for a Firefox extension. Something that parses T&C's and pops up a DANGER warning on a page.
        • bigfudge 1 hour ago
          Being “unenforceable” doesn’t stop them making your life a misery in the process, ruining your credit rating etc.
      • nvme0n1p1 1 hour ago
        Here's Cloudflare's T&C in comic form, for those with short attention spans.

        https://nedroidcomics.tumblr.com/post/41879001445/the-intern...

    • stanleychink 4 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • jonluca 11 hours ago
    Wow the people in this thread are a huge bummer. This is much cooler and I doubt this is a real safety issue. You can already sign up for a free cloudflare account and deploy it for free, on your own, on a free workers.dev domain. The friction removal here isn't going to meaningfully change the security / amount of malicious content.
    • combyn8tor 10 hours ago
      Well according to the people in this thread it was previously impossible for bad actors to host a website, and CloudFlare has now given them this unique ability.
      • femboyvtuber 6 hours ago
        [dead]
      • 0xcafefood 5 hours ago
        Why would Cloudflare do that? They shouldn't help bad actors.
        • ComplexSystems 4 hours ago
          Who, exactly, should help people host a website?
          • simultsop 3 hours ago
            Best case: themselves. Since we are not there yet, reliable services.
      • judge2020 8 hours ago
        I really hope/imagine this project specifically has a LLM of some kind doing real-time analysis on the uploaded files for malware from the get-go. How good that is could be is anyone's guess (and chances are there would be blind spots / evasion techniques).
    • arcatech 8 hours ago
      When you see a group of people being critical, you can either see it as a “bummer”, or you can see it as people critically thinking about a thing.

      Is it really more useful to have everyone expressing how much they like something instead of identifying problems?

      Is seeing people talking about the things they don’t like something that makes you unhappy? Why?

      • ddtaylor 7 hours ago
        I think the HN rule for "curmudgeonly" applies.

        > Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

        I think HN should be a place where I am excited to see what others have to add. When I see a post I am excited to see what takes and spins others have on it. I do want real criticism and a lively debate about important things, but there has to be a balance.

        I want to see other comments that seem like they genuinely want to help steer something or build people up. Sometimes I get the impression that's not happening on HN.

        • stackghost 5 hours ago
          There needs to be another rule against being a techno-sycophant.
          • brookst 5 hours ago
            To the curmudgeon, its techno-sycophancy to say the wheel is a pretty good thing.

            It’s just another take on shill / sheeple / etc. it gets old.

            • stackghost 5 hours ago
              And to the sycophant, pointing out real and obvious drawbacks is being a curmudgeon.
              • overtone1000 3 hours ago
                In such situations, the golden mean is a useful lens.
        • sieabahlpark 6 hours ago
          [dead]
      • Nifty3929 5 hours ago
        The problem is that everything is negative, all the time. Nothing good is allowed to be acknowledged. Everything someone or some company does must not be acknowledged to have any redeeming value- it’s all just negative

        Which is sad, because so much amazing stuff is happening on the world right now, and seems to be only accelerating. For everybody.

        • puchatek 3 hours ago
          Amazing stuff? You mean technical stuff right? Because politically, demographically and climate wise we're headed for disaster or at least dystopia.

          I wished I could find all the science and technology as uplifting as my friends do.

        • arcatech 3 hours ago
          > Nothing good is allowed to be acknowledged.

          What makes you say this?

        • sciencejerk 3 hours ago
          Maybe AI slop has something to do with it?
      • sandcat_ 3 hours ago
        It may not be critical thinking though, but simply being contrarian, which is one of the easiest ways to sound smart without necessarily providing much of value or substance. And strangely, seeing as it’s relatively rare IRL, seemingly the default on the internet. Blindly praising isn’t worth much either, but I doubt that’s what jonluca is encouraging. It’s possible to “yes, and” without resorting to either sycophancy or relentless negatively.
      • dryarzeg 7 hours ago
        > Is seeing people talking about the things they don’t like something that makes you unhappy? Why?

        Probably (I'm just assuming) because that person observes negative/cautious/"I don't like this because X and Y and also Z"/etc sentiment too much and feels like people are only quick to notice issues while forgetting about good sides.

        It's only an assumption, though.

    • pegasus 2 hours ago
      You're encountering the "contrarian dynamic" which dang described in this post (which also explains why your own anti-contrarian comment reached the top) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601
    • superjose 10 hours ago
      Agreed I think this is pretty solid especially since you get all the Cloudflare benefits like CDN from the get-go.
    • croes 59 minutes ago
      But why need they so much license rights?

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48841559

    • swingandamiss 11 hours ago
      hn has turned into a reddit hate fest. It's getting hard to read non stop negativity and hate. I'm happy to see your positive comment.
      • TheTaytay 6 hours ago
        Agreed. This is the same crowd that is mad about free tiers going away on other dev-friendly hosting services…
      • goshx 9 hours ago
        You must be new here :)
        • swingandamiss 9 hours ago
          No, I just created a new alt account. I have a year 1 account as my main.
          • j-bos 8 hours ago
            that's new :)
            • godelski 6 hours ago
              Even you're relatively new. There definitely was a shift as AI took off

              Also, they said "year 1" not "1 year old"

            • r3trohack3r 6 hours ago
              I think maybe GP means they have an account that was created in the first year of the site, not a 1 year old account
      • jnaina 9 hours ago
        wait till anyone remotely mentions apple or apple products. the neckbeards on their thinkpads will come in droves to shit on cupertino's best.
        • bartvk 2 hours ago
          It's not Apple in general. If they release a new Mac Mini, it's fine. The thread when the Neo was released, was outright jubilant. It's whenever macOS is mentioned, it devolves in extreme negativity. I always, always avoid those.
      • phoghed 7 hours ago
        Brother it’s always been like this. Just check n-gate.com (tragic loss btw, rip)
        • ddtaylor 7 hours ago
          Hi! I have been following n-gate.com a small bit over the years, because I found it very interesting and it was a rabbit hole I wanted to go down.

          I actually setup "xor-gate" for a while, which was trying to be a similar thing co-authored by a friend, but it was too time consuming and we gave up.

          Did the author pass? I'm not trying to be crass, but I don't know the details.

    • adithyassekhar 7 hours ago
      I think they are all bots or threatened to see their little hobby now being accessible, classic gatekeeping.
    • esjeon 7 hours ago
      Corporations acting as if naive is a bit of problem in reality. For one thing, CF is probably the largest entity serving pirated content internationally while hiding the identities of actual perpetrators for privacy.

      Same here: CF is basically giving malicious actors an ability to ship contents/data publicly while laundering the legal responsibility of those actors.

      Now tell me what is cool

      • MallocVoidstar 6 hours ago
        > For one thing, CF is probably the largest entity serving pirated content internationally while hiding the identities of actual perpetrators for privacy.

        That's awesome, glad to hear it

      • x-complexity 6 hours ago
        > Now tell me what is cool

        Not immediately being a copyright bootlicker.

        The fact that you went straight to "BuT pIrAtEs" already shows who you actually care: Corpos, not people.

        • esjeon 5 hours ago
          A dirty secret is that piracy is being abused by criminal organizations[1]. When people unknowingly access such sites to see contents for free, it generate ad revenue for those organizations, which can fund other crimes.

          [1]: https://www.interpol.int/en/Crimes/Illicit-goods/Projects/Pr...

          • venzaspa 27 minutes ago
            Broadly speaking any organisation facilitating piracy is implicitly a criminal one. Piracy is a pretty large field though and the economics of say a streaming site are going to be very different from running a torrent tracker. The fact you can use a torrent tracker without even visiting the site (Radarr/Sonarr etc) tells me that running a tracker site, probably isn't very lucrative.
      • stackghost 5 hours ago
        >Now tell me what is cool

        Piracy is cool. Information wants to be free.

        I hate the corporate bootlicking that is so prevalent here.

        • gonzalohm 5 hours ago
          What about centralizing the internet like Cloudfare is doing? Once corporate greed starts creeping we will find ourselves on the verge of pay per visit a website
          • stackghost 5 hours ago
            You mean centralizing the web? Doesn't bother me. Most of the web is a dumpster fire of AI slop anyway.

            There's more to the Internet than the world wide web, though. NNTP and IRC communities remain vibrant, if diminished in size

            • willtemperley 1 hour ago
              Are you aware of any projects to replace the current web implementation?

              I've noticed the current version is largely accessed by Chrome which appears to be a trojan.

              • stackghost 46 minutes ago
                Other than gopher/Gemini, not really, no
            • 3997531578 3 hours ago
              [dead]
  • andrethegiant 12 hours ago
    Netlify made this 10 years ago... they even copied the name! https://app.netlify.com/drop
    • tech234a 11 hours ago
      And BitBalloon before that (which Netlify acquired) http://web.archive.org/web/20131028083240/https://www.bitbal...
      • neom 7 hours ago
        BitBalloon was the original project from Matt, the founder of Netlify!
      • gfat 10 hours ago
        Loved this app. What is old is new again.
    • hliyan 2 hours ago
      Isn't this what we used to do with Geocities a quarter century ago? And with most other websites that offered FTP upload? You didn't have to be very technical -- there were windows FTP clients where you could just type in the IP, username, password and see an explorer-like view, onto which you could just drag and drop your HTML and image files.
    • brightball 12 hours ago
      There are numerous products like this out there. Isn’t that where Dropbox got its name in the first place?
      • hoherd 10 hours ago
        I thought it was a reference to the Mac OS X `~/Public/Drop Box` directory, which was a write-only place for people to send files to your user, which has been around since the first OS X beta came out in 2000.
        • jamesfinlayson 8 hours ago
          I vaguely remember being told to put assignments in a drop box (like a mail box on campus) in the mid 2000s at least, and I'm sure it wasn't a new concept then.
          • hoherd 8 hours ago
            Oh dang, you're right. Mac OS X was my first Mac OS, but it looks like the Drop Box concept existed long before OS X. Here's a reference from 1991 titled "AppleShare Drop Box: Access for System 6 and 7 Clients" https://www.savagetaylor.com/TIL/TIL09033.pdf
        • lelandfe 5 hours ago
          A term still used on Tahoe. Right click a file in Finder, Get Info. A file permissions option is "Write only (Drop Box)"
      • forgotusername6 2 hours ago
        A drop box is a real physical thing, where you drop items for other people to collect.
      • scubbo 10 hours ago
        I was always under the impression that that was referencing the notion from spycraft.
      • latchkey 11 hours ago
        Don't forget Digital Ocean Droplets.
        • neom 6 hours ago
          FWIW, We called them droplets because drop of water in the (Digital)Ocean.
        • frankdenbow 10 hours ago
          Or Drop.io which got bought by Meta
    • giancarlostoro 8 hours ago
      Its not exactly a very elaborate name.
      • oasisbob 8 hours ago
        Elaborate enough?

        Funny story: I used to work for a startup which had a trademark on "Airdrop". When Apple announced that feature, it took everyone there by surprise. Ended up reaching out and selling it to them for a buck or two in favor of maintaining goodwill.

        • inventor7777 7 hours ago
          Ha, that's funny. When you say "a buck or two" do you really mean it was almost nothing or did Apple compensate you appropriately? I'm also surprised that Apple didn't catch that before if it was trademarked.
        • inigyou 7 hours ago
          Why did you value Apple's goodwill more than a couple million dollars?
      • arm32 8 hours ago
        My... Aviato?
        • giancarlostoro 8 hours ago
          Infatrode, wtf is Infatrode

          (I might be butchering it, course it is an Office Space reference)

          He was my absolute favorite character in that show.

          • floydnoel 7 hours ago
            I think it was Initrode. I used to watch it every day haha
            • giancarlostoro 7 hours ago
              They intentionally butchered it I think but it still cracked me up
    • dmillar 11 hours ago
      Low barrier services don't care who's first in this epoch.
    • ares623 10 hours ago
      But this time it's with ~blockchain~ AI!
    • r_lee 10 hours ago
      ouch... I get that it's a simple concept but darn it really does seem like ctrl c ctrl v lmao
  • dirkc 6 minutes ago
    Cloudflare seems to be an example of a company massively upping their output in the last year or so. And a lot of it seems AI driven.

    I'm definitely keeping an eye on them to see if it works out for them. And if I will need to start routing around them to sleep easily at night.

  • monooso 10 minutes ago
    Really excited about the upcoming Cloudflare FTP.
  • altbdoor 6 hours ago
  • PaybackTony 4 hours ago
    There is a reason I had to lock my better version of this (https://quickish.site) behind Google OAuth to start. Like it or not, this type of stuff is going to be more popular than it was when Netlify / Heroku was doing it a decade ago.
  • mohsen1 53 minutes ago
    This is perfect for my Chrome Extension for recording sessions and capturing screenshots, audio narration and videos. The output is a zip file with everything so if user wants to share they can use this

    https://github.com/mohsen1/session-recorder-chrome-extension

    I built above chrome extension because anything in this area has been trying to monetize the solution. I wanted a free and open source version of this to exist.

  • Bender 13 hours ago
    There must be some really good protection on this. If I enabled such a thing on any of my servers it would be full of warez, porn, malware, CSAM and who knows what else within minutes. Curious how they manage to keep it clean.
    • inigyou 7 hours ago
      The protection is that they're rich enough to handle requests from law enforcement without going to jail themselves. They'll certainly pass your IP address to law enforcement if asked.
    • mattlondon 12 hours ago
      Only live for an hour.

      But that won't stop people doing bad stuff for an hour I guess. Vibe code up some on-demand thing that you ping...

      • Y-bar 11 hours ago
        One hour is great for spearphishing attacks, once the victim has been infected their IT department will have no trace of the source.
    • hoppp 10 hours ago
      They already allow hosting static websites so I think the same guardrails are implemented.
      • Bender 9 hours ago
        I've never used CF so I could be ignorant in this matter. I assumed perhaps incorrectly that people had to verify their email address and delegate their domain(s) to CF including setting the glue records in the TLD servers meaning there is possibly a financial trail somewhere probably in the DNS registrars and perhaps a mail provider, whereas this is just drag-and-drop with no money trail.

        I have no idea what guardrails they have in place in the background that blocks malware, CSAM, warez and such on their free accounts.

        • hoppp 8 hours ago
          Just having an account with an email address is enough.

          They assign a subdomain automatically for uploads, same as cloudflare workers.

          I don't know what they do, but implementing guardrails for this is possible nowadays with AI, but maybe they use a "mechanical turk"

        • tick_tock_tick 4 hours ago
          If you want your own domain you need to do a bunch of that but you can also host stuff on your own free subdomain of their workers.dev
    • DakotaR 12 hours ago
      Yeah, I was going to start a file drop site like 0x until realizing what it'd be used for
    • busymom0 6 hours ago
      At least when it comes to bad types of porn, it's be similar to Imgur allowing anonymous uploads. They already do CSAM scanning on uploads to their R2 storage:

      https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-simpler-path-to-a-safer-intern...

      • Bender 6 hours ago
        That makes sense. In that case I have to assume that Cloudflare will not permit encrypted archive files as one can hide the image fingerprints all together.
        • colechristensen 3 hours ago
          Cloudflare in particular has an enormous fingerprint of your online activities.

          Attempting to distribute/acquire illegal things through Cloudflare is an exercise in how to get caught.

          • Bender 3 hours ago
            True, though they front-end 4chan which have drawn/AI kiddo material which is a no-no in the US of A which makes it difficult for me to use as my primary news site and for obtaining medical advice.
  • jjcm 9 hours ago
    Cloudflare is obviously more trustworthy/robust here, but if name of the url matters to you, my site non.io [1] allows for named uploads, ie https://html.non.io/solara [2]

    Somewhat useful if you want a url that isn't a hash / is more self descriptive.

    [1] Launch discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296695

    [2] This was a demo of the output of a design tool I'm working on, only the home/accommodations/about pages work.

  • alberth 10 hours ago
    Reminds me of web development in the 1990s.

    I honestly miss those days of deployment simplicity.

    • gesis 10 hours ago
      FTPing files to `~/public_html` was the best... Miss those days.
      • hoppp 10 hours ago
        It still works...
        • 3form 9 hours ago
          It's not the ability that's missing; it's those days.
          • bigbuppo 7 hours ago
            Yeah, these days if you aren't treating even the smallest of small projects that do something like "query database spit out report" as if they are major IT infrstructure projects, complete with designers, UX specialists, and accessbility experts that never talked to a disabled person to find out what they actually need, spin up 375 ec2 instances, use 19 different database systems, and send the logs to a third party, then you're literally the worst person possible, or so I've been told.

            It's like, my dude last week this was an excel spreadsheet.

  • R_Spaghetti 1 hour ago
    I dropped a static html page and all I got was Cloudflares well known 'Performing security verification' (and so did a Google pagespeed check).
  • mybbor 3 hours ago
    I co-founded a page builder for WordPress. Myself and my co-founders would joke about the "friends and family" problem. When friends or family asked us to help build their website, we usually pointed them away from our tool+WordPress for something simpler. It's nice to see more options out there that reduce the friction from someone with an idea to something published and sharable.

    Several weeks ago, I got frustrated hitting the free tier limits on Netlify, and was looking for a self-hosted solution for this problem. I built it using a DO VPS and Caddy in the backend. It's free on Github. I was able to get the whole thing set up in an hour or two with the help of an agent. Feel free to give it a spin.

    https://github.com/RobbyMcCullough/honeydrop

  • smalltorch 12 hours ago
    Hmm, that's fun and useful. Here is snake game for 60 minutes.

    https://drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev

    • tengbretson 12 hours ago
      Your code appears to have a bug where if the arrow keys trigger a change of direction twice in a single frame interval, it can mistakenly send the snake back on itself.
    • copper-float 12 hours ago
      What an honor. I got a high score of seven.
    • Self-Perfection 8 hours ago
      $ curl -I https://drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev/ curl: (7) Failed to connect to drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev port 443 after 47 ms: Couldn't connect to server

      Tried from two hosts, different countries.

      • tmp10423288442 8 hours ago
        Yes, it's expired I think - it only lasts for 1 hour
  • _pdp_ 12 hours ago
    It is cool to see not sure why you would use it.

    Also it seems to me that this is a good way to exfiltrate data, rubber stamped by cloudflare themselves.

    • gruez 12 hours ago
      Isn't there already thousands of ways for exfiltrating data that must be whitelisted by corporate firewalls? office365/gsuite, for instance. Not to mention the classics like dns.
  • janandonly 12 hours ago
    Makes sense. It plays nicely with the vibe code kids who don’t know how to do GitHub or don’t know to ask their LLM about it.
    • navigate8310 45 minutes ago
      From FTP to CI/CD to drag and drop, society is going backwards
  • hoppp 10 hours ago
    I can see this interface is for vibe coders haha

    I have been hosting static websites with cloudflare for years and finding how to do it on the UI is getting harder as they add more things and reoranize.

    • lenkite 8 minutes ago
      Does the T&C differ if you do it the old fashioned way ?
    • asasidh 3 hours ago
      exactly this. This is why i ended up moving to other platforms like vercel for random vibe coded projects than wrestle with cloudflare admin portal.
  • rickcarlino 11 hours ago
    Desktop operating systems should be able to run zipped web apps the way Electron apps run today. It ought to just be part of the OS.
    • ubertaco 7 hours ago
      Adobe Air, for the obscure nostalgia bomb
      • rickcarlino 7 hours ago
        I was going to mention Microsoft Active Desktop in the original comment, but I didn’t want HN to know how old I am.
    • dghlsakjg 4 hours ago
      Unzip it.

      Double click the html file.

      The OS will run the web app using a browser that is just part of the OS.

      • rickcarlino 4 hours ago
        You have clearly never actually tried that.
    • TZubiri 11 hours ago
      And if there's a form or something with a backend? Just break?
  • steve_adams_86 9 hours ago
    Cool, it worked!

    https://drop-1e1a536f-10d.honeysuckle-gull.workers.dev/

    It's minesweeper, but the logic uses xstate/store. The link in the bottom is broken; it's supposed to go to `building-minesweeper-with-xstate-store.html`

    I have no need for this but I love that my friends could vibe out a website, drop it here, claim it, and host it for pennies. This is great.

    "Your site is reachable within ~32ms of 95% of the world’s Internet-connected population" isn't new but it's cool to see that achieved so trivially.

  • Cider9986 12 hours ago
    >Something went wrong An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support.

    I have a few qualms with this app.

  • luciana1u 3 hours ago
    Cloudflare Drop: finally, a domain registrar that understands the real use case is buying 47 domains at 3am and never deploying anything to any of them
  • millsau 2 hours ago
    What about the databases?
  • bart3r 3 hours ago
    So, if I need a company website, can i do the following:

    - drop my html into Cloudflare drop

    - setup a CNAME DNS for my domain to point at cloudflare URL

    - profit

    ?

  • BoppreH 11 hours ago
    Dropped a folder with a small HTML project, and after 20 seconds got "Something went wrong. An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support.".

    Note how the error has zero information.

    Looking in the network tab, a POST request to /upload returned 403 and an HTML page starting with "Sorry, you have been blocked", and to "email the site owner to let them know you were blocked".

    I'm very tired of this adversarial approach to software coupled with vague errors.

    EDIT: it was the file './git/hooks/fsmonitor-watchman.sample' created by default on git init. Maybe because it's Perl. Worse-than-useless "please try again" and "you've been blocked" for committing the sin of uploading a folder that's a git repository. Sigh...

  • throwaway81523 12 hours ago
    Wait, my first impression was that it points a local browser to your local browser. Now it looks like it uploads your folder to Cloudflare and temporarily serves it over the web. But is that different from what we used to do with FTP? Are there any databases or anything like basic PHP hosts supply? It's just static sites?

    Is this a product or what? What's the purpose? Is there an API?

    • joenot443 11 hours ago
      A minute ago I had an HTML doc I wanted to share with a PM. It was a Claude prepared demo of a hypothetical feature. Lots of screenshots.

      I ended up just embedding them directly in the HTML as base64 and sending him a 15mb file, but hypothetically this would have been a nice solution instead.

      • amaldavid 2 hours ago
        Been through the exact same issues and built a publishing workflow over cloudflare a few weeks back and did decent reception from HN as well

        you can check it out here: https://github.com/Amal-David/pagecast

      • qingcharles 11 hours ago
        Absolutely agree. There's an insane "feature" of Claude Design which means you can only share the link to the design with other users on your account?! You can export the design, though, but then you need somewhere to quickly drop a bunch of HTML + assets. This would be perfect for that.
        • efields 11 hours ago
          Trying to solve this here: https://jlnk.us

          Here's the instructions my agents have:

          > Shareable Deliverables → jlnk.us (default) The jlnk MCP server is configured machine-wide for all team agents. It publishes disposable public links: create_link(content, ttl) returns an unguessable URL anyone can open without logging in; it self-destructs after its TTL (4h/24h/72h, default 4h, max 5 MB). Also list_my_links() and delete_link(id).

          > When handing a human (Founder, CEO reviewer) something to look at — QC screenshots, prototypes, reports, before/after comparisons — default to a jlnk.us link instead of a repo file path or local path. Use 72h for Founder review, shorter when the review window is same-day.

          > Content must be ONE self-contained HTML file: inline CSS/JS, embed screenshots as base64 data URIs (![image](data:image/png;base64,...)).

          > Downscale images to stay under the 5 MB cap.

          > Links are public to anyone holding the URL. NEVER publish secrets, API keys, credentials, or private client data.

          > Links expire — they are a viewing convenience, not the system of record. Durable artifacts still go to the repo and issue attachments as usual.

          • throwaway81523 10 hours ago
            Sort of like a pastebin for directory structures then, hmm.
        • deeprack4sure 6 hours ago
          Wow, that does sound like a serious hardship for someone who lets Claude write all their code for them.

          Creating a folder for some files. Dude, maybe you should file for disability for repetetive stress disorder for "double clicking" or even single clicking twice.

          This aggression will not STAND man!

          We need computers to go back to pencil and paper but STILL be computers! But not operated by me? Wierd operated by a fake bot me? Wait! thats malware! Wha?

      • pantelisk 11 hours ago
        There are also solutions for sharing your homelab with others (basically tunneling from your machine->server (internet accessible) <-> client. Though, if your machine would go to sleep that whole chain would fall apart. A few good automatic solutions out there that solve the problem (no "just replace dropbox with ftp" type of argument).

        However, I see the appeal of this. Kind of surprised it hasn't happened yet to be honest.

        • inigyou 7 hours ago
          SSH remote port forwarding. ssh -R 0.0.0.0:80:127.0.0.1:80

          Requires the server's sshd config to have GatewayPorts yes, or the server will bind to 127.0.0.1 instead

      • efields 11 hours ago
        I built a tool _just the other day_ for this exact purpose. Now my agents proactively make disposable links for me: https://jlnk.us
      • dmillar 11 hours ago
        Replit is used a lot in this context. Their agent is good, but their circumvent-policies-to-get-something-in-front-of-execs-quickly is an amazing and mis-priced feature.
      • throwaway81523 11 hours ago
        You could just upload to a personal or other website? I sometimes do that. Is there any security or privacy (e.g. password protection) for this Cloudflare Drop site?
      • vulture916 11 hours ago
        Check out Tailscale - they have TUNS + share the source files with someone else in tailnet.
  • jatins 3 hours ago
    oh wow, a blast from the past. I remember a site called staticdrop or statichost like a decade ago, before vercel and everything that did the same thing

    Good to see great ideas making a comeback

  • sgt 12 hours ago
    Tried uploading a ZIP and got:

    "Something went wrong An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support."

    • TZubiri 11 hours ago
      When contacting support:

      "Please upload a screenshot of the error by dragging a zip of the png file."

      • grg0 5 hours ago
        Please zip the contact by dragging a support of the screenshot.
  • altairprime 12 hours ago
    Hah! This is exactly how I’m serving the vestigial remnant of my blogging in the early 2000s from a ZIP-backed Cloudflare Worker today. Should I rebuild my site with Drop+Claim or is it fine as-is? I kind of feel like ‘if what I have works, don’t change it’ is the best path.
  • rjnz199 4 hours ago
    Wonder if it has CLI so coding agents can forward path straight to their API and it would give the CLI site's address. Now that would be cool!
  • ChrisArchitect 13 hours ago
    > No account needed. Deployment is active for 60 minutes, then expires unless you claim it.

    (https://x.com/BraydenWilmoth/status/2074894829616509358)

  • dmd 8 hours ago
    All I ever get is "Something went wrong An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support."
    • inigyou 7 hours ago
      I think that means you're a bot.
      • dmd 6 hours ago
        beep boop
  • grepsedawk 10 hours ago
    This is pretty cool, thanks for sharing. It really enables less tech savvy users. It would really enable frontpage/dreamworks-like flows for some people
  • dowonseo 3 hours ago
    I thought cf dns was down again
  • jeffgreco 7 hours ago
    What is this for?
    • neom 6 hours ago
      I have hosted my personal site on Netlify for many many years because it's just basic js/html/css, I picked Netlify because I can just updated the index.html in the "website" folder on my desktop and literally drag it to Netlify to update it, saves a lot of time/thinking if you need something simple online quickly to show someone etc. I presume this is a similar idea.
  • ricardobeat 11 hours ago
    I remember doing this in 2006. FTP. Good times.
    • barnacs 10 hours ago
      I remember making a Qt app for a friend that would upload dropped files via ftp and copy the link to the clipboard. Good old days!
  • anshumankmr 5 hours ago
    JAMstack for the rest of us I suppose.
  • asasidh 4 hours ago
    I think this is great. As usual the reaction from HN folks is on brand.
  • ChrisArchitect 13 hours ago
    Extension of the temporary accounts they needed to enable for Agents https://blog.cloudflare.com/temporary-accounts/
  • djfobbz 11 hours ago
    Yet I can't drag and drop a plain old HTML file without putting it in a folder or a ZIP file first.
    • spartanatreyu 8 hours ago
      You can, the file just has to be named "index.html".
  • jsabess24 3 hours ago
    Interesting
  • ed_mercer 10 hours ago
    Cool, just 20 years too late.
  • nickgray 10 hours ago
    This is cool and I like it.
  • system2 11 hours ago
    It would be nice if we could see some information such as file size limitations, demos, link structure, management, etc. Am I expected to upload a random HTML file and see how it works?
    • petee 11 hours ago
      Yeah I'm very lost on what this is supposed to do -- "Summon your site" is quite vague. "see it live", like a demo? or is this actually published somewhere? Is it forever?

      Desktop mode doesn't show any more information either

    • Fergusonb 11 hours ago
      Yep, I chucked it a file on my desktop: index.html present Max individual file size 25MB Total file count <2000 Total size less than 100MB
  • deeprack4sure 7 hours ago
    Look. Guys (?)

    If cloudflare wants to be the next "Megaupload" what business is it of yours?

    There is a guy named kim DOT com. That is actually fucking cool. Whether or not he himself is actually cool. Or in prison.

  • heipei 11 hours ago
    Cloudflare is really good at launching features that facility low-friction deployment of malicious content (such as phishing) on the Internet, piggybacking on their hosting reputation and the fact that you can't easily block their ASN or domains.
    • simultsop 11 hours ago
      I don't know your experience. Once I was toying around and doing a basic auth with registration and so. The weekend was over and couldn't get back to that couple of months. The worker was quarantined and marked as phishing automatically. So I believe they have something in place to prevent those you complain.
      • jszymborski 11 hours ago
        Your anecdote just illustrates that their system detects legit uses as abuses, not that they have a system that effectively detects abuses.
        • simultsop 3 hours ago
          But it is not that they have nothing. It was my laziness that I could not setup dev prod env's. When you develop on preview, I don't think they will do much.
    • cute_boi 10 hours ago
      Cloudflare is also like a Chinese copycat machine. They mostly copy some successful project and sell it at cheap price.
    • Waterluvian 11 hours ago
      Be the change you want to see to make the world of your dreams.

      And then sell its denizens malice protection services.

  • bossyTeacher 10 hours ago
    It could be fun to use a temporary Mediafire/Rapidshare/Megaupload service. Especially if you need to transfer something between an Android and an iPhone.
  • nalekberov 11 hours ago
    The internet will soon be flooded with even more scam landing pages.
    • cute_boi 10 hours ago
      And you should be using cloudflare to protect yourself...
  • toomuchtodo 11 hours ago
    Cloudflare folks: Please consider supporting WARC archives for deployment.
  • anonymousiam 10 hours ago
    Odds are that this new feature will not suffer the same outcome as Megaupload, because of Cloudflare's close relationship with the USG.
  • xyst 7 hours ago
    geocities/angelfire but for Gen Z and A
  • AndrianV 44 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • arm32 8 hours ago
    This definitely won't get used to host unlimited phishing sites. /s
  • jaideepjagyasi 3 hours ago
    shitty app, doesnt even exclude hidden folders
  • sleepynoodle 11 hours ago
    This is so cool.
  • S0y 11 hours ago
    Cloudflare has the astonishing ability to make me hate them more as a company every new feature they launch.
    • vevoe 11 hours ago
      why?
      • S0y 11 hours ago
        Every new feature they've launched recently can be used to make the web more dangerous for everyone except those who use Cloudflare.
        • denismenace 11 hours ago
          How would this make the web more dangerous? Its just static file hosting. Already wildly available!
          • TZubiri 11 hours ago
            The argument would be that they sell the kevlar and the guns

            Kevlar:

            https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/turnstile/

            Guns:

            https://support.cloudflarewarp.com/

            To be fair, CF mainly develops defensive cybersecurity products, the extent to which their tools might be used maliciously is pretty on par with other regular tools.

            But, it just has bad optics and potential COI/Racketeering when CF is at both sides of the counter.

            To be explicit, in case it isn't obvious,Cloudflare emerged as a DDoS protection company, detecting attacks from distributed sources is part of the raison d'etre, and domains and IP addresses are a key part of that infrastructure.

            By subletting their own IP addresses for navigation with warp, and their own domains for hosting of webcontent with subdomain hosting, they are providing pooled anonimity for their customers, which is precisely what makes it very hard for defenders on the other side to implement foundational security measures like IP bans, or IP block bans, or domain bans, or Whois/RDAP domain analysis.

          • latchkey 11 hours ago
            phishing
  • collabs 12 hours ago
    Congratulations on launching!

    I tried uploading a git repository that I have previously successfully published on Github pages. This is a "no build" website I have built with the help of Claude. It should just work but I keep getting an error. Who can I reach out to give them steps to reproduce? The website repository is public and I feel like anyone at Cloudflare who wants to reproduce my problem can quite literally clone my repo and upload it to cloudflare drop.

    Please drop your cloudflare email address and I will reach out to you with my repository information.

    • turtlebits 11 hours ago
      Or you could do some of your own troubleshooting? Uploading a git repo is different than uploading a zipped/folder, especially if your index.htm/l isn't at the root.
      • collabs 9 hours ago
        Thank you for the reply. Index dot html is already at the root of the folder and it deploys just fine on GitHub pages.
    • aetherspawn 9 hours ago
      Hey stranger, welcome to 2026. It’s somewhat different to what you’re used to in 2035. We do things differently here.