Pricing
Tessil is free. Here is what that includes, what it costs to run, and how it stays that way.
Without an account
- 500 MB per file and per transfer
- 500 MB a month
- 5 transfers a day
- Expiry up to 24 hours
With a free account
- 1 GiB per file and per transfer
- 2 GB a month
- 20 transfers a day
- Expiry up to 72 hours
- A dashboard of what you've sent, plus passkeys and encrypted titles
Encryption is not the paid part
End-to-end encryption, password-protected transfers, passkeys, and automatic expiry are on both columns above. They are the product, not an upsell. Nothing on this site puts your privacy behind a payment, and nothing ever will.
Why the limits exist
Not to nudge you toward a paid plan, because there isn't one. The software costs nothing to run again for one more person, but storage and bandwidth do, and they are paid for out of one person's pocket: servers in Germany and the Netherlands, object storage, transactional email, a domain.
The caps are set where they are so the service survives a bad week without becoming someone's free CDN. If you hit them regularly and they are in your way, tell me about it. Knowing which limit actually bites is more useful than guessing.
If you want to support it
Entirely optional, and it unlocks nothing. There is no supporter badge and no hidden feature, because a privacy tool that treats paying users better is one that has started measuring who pays.
- Polar, monthly or one-time, whatever amount you pick
- Ko-fi, for a one-time tip
- GitHub Sponsors, monthly or one-off
If you have a Tessil account, check out with the same email address. Nothing depends on it today, but it is the only thing that ties a contribution to an account, so it keeps the option open.
Honestly, telling one person who needs encrypted file transfer that this exists helps more than a few euros does.
Cancelling monthly support
Under a minute, on your own, at any time. No notice period, no retention offer, and nobody will ask you why.
- Polar: every receipt email links to the customer portal. Open the portal, cancel there, and it stops at the end of the period you have already paid for.
- GitHub Sponsors: cancel from your GitHub sponsorship settings, same as any other sponsorship.
- Ko-fi: a one-time tip is not recurring, so there is nothing to cancel.
If the portal link has gone missing or a charge looks wrong, email [email protected]. I will cancel it for you, and refund the last payment if it renewed after you meant to stop.
Sponsorship and advertising
I am open to a sponsor placement if you run something a privacy-minded audience would genuinely want. The conditions are not negotiable, because the promise is the product:
- Static text or an image, served from tessil.app. No third-party script, no iframe, no pixel, no beacon. Nothing that makes a request to anyone but us.
- No tracking, no profiling, no personalisation. You are buying a placement, not an audience segment. I cannot tell you who saw it because I do not collect that.
- Marketing pages only. Nothing appears on a download page. That URL contains a decryption key and I am not putting anyone else's content near it.
- Labelled plainly as a sponsor, never dressed up as content.
That rules out essentially every ad network, which is the point. If it still sounds like a fit: [email protected].
Will there be a paid plan?
Probably, eventually, for people who need higher limits or longer retention than the free caps allow. Two commitments if that happens: nothing available on Free today moves behind it, and encryption, passkeys, and password protection stay free forever.
Until then there is nothing to buy here and no upgrade prompt to dodge.