How Ship works

What a shipped item is

A shipped item is the rawest unit on Shippie: a single lightweight artefact — a web page, an image, a PDF, an audio or video clip, a document, a data file, or a one-file app — published as a short link without packaging it, listing it in Apps, or signing anyone up.

Ship is for handing one thing to one person quickly. Shipped items are not apps, they are not listed, and they expire on their own.

Ship is a lightweight publisher, not file storage. Almost anything web-renderable works and gets a beautiful link with a built-in viewer. Apps and installers (.exe, .dmg, .apk and the like) are refused — we publish, we don’t store.

Create a shipped item

Open Ship, choose your file or paste your content, pick a privacy mode, and you get a short link to share. Most shipped items publish in well under a minute.

You can also ship without the UI, straight from a script or agent, via the Ship API — see the Ship API reference linked below.

What you can ship

Ship almost anything lightweight — a web page, image, PDF, audio, video, document, data file or font. We give it a beautiful link with a built-in viewer. (No apps or installers — we publish, we don’t store.)

• Web pages: HTML previews safely; ZIP sites run live when they include index.html. (.html, .htm, .css, .js, .jsx, .mjs, .svg, .zip)
• Images: Shown full-screen in a clean viewer. (.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .webp, .avif, .gif, .bmp, .ico)
• Documents: PDFs, text and markdown render in-page. (.pdf, .txt, .md)
• Audio & video: Play right at the link with a built-in player. (.mp3, .wav, .ogg, .mp4, .webm)
• Data: CSV opens as a table; JSON/XML pretty-printed. (.csv, .json, .xml)
• Fonts: Preview as a type specimen. (.woff, .woff2, .ttf, .otf)

How a shipped item looks at its link

Open the share link and the artefact renders right there. Images open in a clean viewer. PDFs, text, audio, and video open inline when the browser supports them. HTML opens in a sandboxed preview. Unknown files show one clear Download button.

The main link is always a Shippie viewer URL. Download is explicit, inside the viewer, after the browser has opened the shipped item.

Sealed vs shareable

Sealed shipped items are encrypted in your browser with AES-256-GCM. The key is generated on your device and lives only in the URL fragment (the part after #key=), which browsers never send to the server. Shippie stores and serves only ciphertext and cannot read the item. The decrypted content is rendered in a locked-down sandbox iframe with no network access, so it cannot phone home.

Shareable shipped items are public web pages that Shippie serves and can read, because they are public by design. They are served from an isolated per-item origin with a hardened Content-Security-Policy and are scanned on upload for secrets and for phishing and credential-harvesting patterns — a risk signal, not a guarantee.

• Honest caveat: a sealed link contains the key, so anyone with the link can read the shipped item. The full URL can be saved in browser history or tab-sync. Treat a sealed link like a password.
• A sealed link grants access to all current and future versions of that shipped item. To revoke access, delete it and ship a new one.
• Choose sealed when the content is private; choose shareable when you want a public, scannable page.

Expiry

Shipped items are ephemeral by default. An anonymous shipped item lives for 24 hours. A signed-in shipped item can be kept for up to 7 days. After that it expires automatically and stops serving.

Versioning and rollback

You can publish a new version of a shipped item at the same link. Previous versions are kept so you can roll back to an earlier one.

For sealed items, the link grants access to whichever version is active — including future versions — so deleting and re-shipping is the way to cut off an old recipient.

Reporting and takedown

Anyone can report a public shipped item. Reports go to Shippie via the report control on the item and the /api/drops/[id]/report endpoint.

Admins can suspend a shipped item with a kill switch: a suspended item returns a 451 on the very next request, and the serving cache is purged so there is no stale window. For abuse, copyright, or takedown requests, contact hello@shippie.app.