Upload without an account: how anonymous sessions work

The first upload should take seconds, not an onboarding flow. When you drop a file on the home page, ZeroStorage issues an anonymous session cookie and files that upload under it to your browser.

What a session gives you

• A private list of your files at /anonymous-files, same browser only.
• The same share links, embed codes, and expiry controls as an account.
• No email, no password, no profile to delete later.

What we keep

A session identifier, file metadata, and the storage record needed to serve the file. Not your contacts, not your browsing history, not a fingerprint we can sell. If you clear the cookie, the link between you and those files goes with it — which is also why you should keep the session if you want the files back.

When to graduate to an account

Accounts add folders, password protection, SFTP, API keys, and cross-device access. If you are about to hand a folder to a client or wire ZeroStorage into a pipeline, register first and move the files once. See pricing for what the paid tiers remove.

Limits that keep it free

Anonymous sessions get the same storage as a free account, minus the features that need an identity: no API keys, no SFTP, no cross-device file list. Expired files are purged on the same schedule as everything else, and an abandoned session goes away together with its cookie. There is no grace-period extension and no cleanup for you to remember, because the schedule is the product. Nothing in this model requires us to know who you are, so the platform never asks, and there is no account-deletion flow to trust because there is nothing on the far side of it to delete.

• One active session per browser — a second window does not fork your list.
• Rate limits match the free tier, so a session cannot become an anonymous botnet.
• Clearing cookies ends the session; files remain until the purge schedule removes them.

# anonymous upload over the API
curl -F "[email protected]" https://zerostorage.net/api/files/anonymous

The cookie is the credential. Rotate your browser profile and you rotate your session — by design.