CrossBeam: Private Cross-Network File Transfer for Phone-to-Laptop

Transfer your files across devices easily

If you don’t go with peer-to-peer, and use large file transfers through the centralized server/database, then you will definitely end up bankrupting yourself through cloud bandwidth and egress fees. Additionally, you are tackling an issue that the vast majority of people are able to work around. Ninety percent of users can easily use Telegram’s “Saved Messages” or WhatsApp’s “Message to Self” feature to seamlessly send images and documents from their phones to their computer. For files of gargantuan size, Wormhole.app does everything that you describe (end-to-end encryption, off of a link, insanely fast). It would be an exciting technical feat to develop but a very challenging SaaS product. File transfer for the masses is a race to the bottom and you are going to be consumed the minute you get any sort of traction due to infrastructure costs.

If you don’t go with peer-to-peer, and use large file transfers through the centralized server/database, then you will definitely end up bankrupting yourself through cloud bandwidth and egress fees. Additionally, you are tackling an issue that the vast majority of people are able to work around. Ninety percent of users can easily use Telegram’s “Saved Messages” or WhatsApp’s “Message to Self” feature to seamlessly send images and documents from their phones to their computer. For files of gargantuan size, Wormhole.app does everything that you describe (end-to-end encryption, off of a link, insanely fast). It would be an exciting technical feat to develop but a very challenging SaaS product. File transfer for the masses is a race to the bottom and you are going to be consumed the minute you get any sort of traction due to infrastructure costs.

The problem is real. The market is very crowded and the solutions that already exist are more capable than people think before they start creating something new. LocalSend is a solution for people on the same network and it is free and open source. Telegram has a feature that lets people save messages. It has become a popular way for developers to copy things across devices. Google Drive and iCloud already handle the problem of accessing things from devices for most people. The gap that you are talking about. People who're not on the same network need to send large files want everything to be encrypted and want to control who can access these files. Is real but it is a small gap. The question that we need to answer before we start building is who is not being helped by the things that already exist and why have they not been helped yet. If the answer is that regular people find the tools too hard to use then that is a problem with how the tools are designed, not a problem with the tools themselves. If the answer is that big companies need to keep track of who's doing what and control who can access things then that is a different kind of product that needs to be sold in a different way. The way you described doing it. Storing things in a database getting them back with a key and encrypting everything from start to finish. Is a way to do it but it also means that we will have to pay for storing things making sure the system is reliable and keeping user data safe. These are costs that will keep going on and on and we need to have a plan for how we will make money from the start. I am not saying that we should not build it.. We should think really hard, about who we are trying to help and what problems they are having before we start writing any code. The clearly we can answer these questions the better all of our decisions will be.