Why my name is on this
A tool that holds your keys should at least tell you who to blame. So, that's me. Right here. There's no mysterious “we” to vanish behind when something breaks, no “the team is looking into it.” There is a team. It's me. The encryption runs on your device before anything uploads, so I can't read your files. I've tried it on my own test data. Can't. That's the entire point.
The origin story
How zcrypt actually happened
A couple of months ago I was moving my whole life between machines: 50-something gigabytes of projects, RAW photos, and half-finished edits I keep swearing I'll get back to. The kind of files you can't just re-download.
Google Drive tapped me on the shoulder at 15GB and asked for my card. So I did the very reasonable thing: I made a second account. Then a third. For about a week I was splitting one folder across three logins like a low-budget digital smuggler, quietly proud of a system held together with tape.
Then I tried TeraBox. “One terabyte, free,” they said. What they didn't say: the download button is hidden like a state secret, your files quietly live on their servers, and the fine print treats your data as theirs to scan and learn from. It really clicked when I uploaded a 4GB folder, watched it crawl to 80%, and watched it fail. My first thought wasn't “let me retry.” It was “why am I handing my entire life to a company whose whole business is knowing what's inside it?”
And here's the part I genuinely can't take credit for, because it's just true: free storage was never free. I just hadn't read the price tag, because the price tag is me. These are billion-dollar companies; privacy isn't a feature they forgot to add, it's the thing they quietly sell against.
So I stopped complaining online and started building, which is really just complaining with extra steps. The idea was simple even though the code very much wasn't: encrypt your files on your device before they leave, so not even I can read them, then store them across the infrastructure you already own and trust. No new data empire. No “we value your privacy” banner that means the exact opposite. Just your files, locked, yours.
Free storage was never free. I just hadn't read the price tag, because the price tag was me.
I'm building it in public: the wins, the bugs, and the 2AM “why is this WASM module re-initialising” commits. It's me and a concerning amount of coffee, so yes, there will be rough edges. The encryption isn't one of them: it's open source, and I can't read your files even if I wanted to. (I don't. But I couldn't.)
Side quests
Other things I've built
I have a bad habit of building the whole thing myself: frontend, backend, and the awkward bits in between. A few others that (mostly) work:
Learnity
AI-powered learning platform with gamified courses and progress tracking.
Next.js 15 · PostgreSQL · Firebase
DocXO
Real-time collaborative documents: multiple cursors, live editing, zero lag.
Next.js · Liveblocks · Lexical
Tellow
Cross-platform video calling app with rooms, chat, and screen share.
React Native · Expo · GetStream
NetLink
A Go chat backend built to hold thousands of concurrent WebSocket connections.
Go · WebSockets · Concurrency
DevToolsHQ
A dashboard of everyday developer tools, formatters, converters, generators.
Next.js · TypeScript · Firebase
ResumeRight
An AI resume optimizer that scores against ATS checks and rewrites weak lines.
Next.js · AI · TypeScript
Toolbox
The usual suspects
The tools I reach for, from the browser all the way down to the bytes on disk:
Say hello
Let's build something
I'm open to new projects and freelance work, and I answer my own messages, mostly because there's no one else to pass them to. Pick a door: