About
Why this exists
Your clipboard stops at the edge of the device it lives on. Everything people do about that is worse than the problem.
The five-second job that takes five minutes
You have a link on your phone and you need it on your laptop. So you email it to yourself. Or you message it to yourself, and now a Wi-Fi password lives in a chat history forever. Or you type a long URL across by hand, twice, because you got a character wrong the first time. Or you sign into something on a hotel computer you would rather not sign into anything on, just to move one line of text.
None of those are hard. They are just friction, several times a day, in the middle of doing something else. And every one of them leaves the thing you were moving sitting somewhere it did not need to be.
Online Clipboards is the version of that with the friction and the residue taken out: open a clipboard, scan the code with your phone, and the two devices are joined. Copy on one, it is on the other. Text, links, images, files, in either direction, until it expires.
The one idea underneath it
A tool that moves your private things between devices should not be able to read them. Not “should promise not to” — should not be able to.
That is a design constraint rather than a feature, and it decides almost every other question. Encryption happens in your browser before anything is sent. The key is put in the part of the link after the #, which browsers never transmit to a server. What reaches us is a block of bytes we have no key for — so “we do not look at your data” stops being a policy you have to take on trust and becomes something you can verify in your own Network tab.
It also rules things out. No server-side search, no history you can scroll back through, no recovering a clipboard you lost the link to. Those are not features we have not got round to. They are things this design cannot have, and we would rather not have them than quietly hold a key.
What we hold ourselves to
Each of these costs something. A principle that costs nothing is a slogan.
Encrypted by default, with no switch to forget
There is no unencrypted mode, no "quick share" that skips it, and no setting to get wrong. The cost is that a lost link is unrecoverable, because the key was never ours to keep a copy of.
Store nothing that can be avoided
Clipboards live in memory and expire on a timer; files are relayed in chunks and never written to disk. The cost is that both devices have to be connected at the same time, and a restart ends every clipboard open at that moment.
No accounts
Nothing to sign up for, nothing to verify, no password to reset, nothing of yours sitting in a database. The cost is that the link is the only credential, so anyone holding it can read that clipboard.
No tracking, no ads, no third-party anything
No analytics, no cookies, no ad network, not even fonts from someone else’s server. This one has no cost to you, and it is also self-serving: a third-party script on a clipboard page could read the key out of the address bar, so the discipline is what makes the encryption claim true.
Say where the edges are
Every product in this category calls itself secure. We publish the attacks this design does not stop, in plain language, on a page anyone can read before trusting us with anything.
How it stays free
A fair question to ask of anything free that handles private data, and usually the answer is that you are the product.
Not here, for a reason that is structural rather than virtuous: there is nothing to sell. We hold no email addresses, no profiles and no readable content. An advertising business would need the tracking we removed, and the tracking would break the encryption claim that is the entire point of the product. The two cannot coexist, so the choice was made once, at the start.
What it actually costs to run is one modest server relaying encrypted bytes, which is affordable precisely because we store nothing. It is free, there is no paid tier holding features back, and nothing here is a trial. If that ever has to change, it will be said plainly on this page — not discovered in a policy update.
Who is behind it
Online Clipboards is built and run independently, from India, by a small team that wanted this to exist and could not find a version of it that was honest about its own limits. There are no investors setting a growth target, which is the main reason it can afford to collect nothing.
Being small is also a limit worth naming: this is not an enterprise service with a 24/7 desk behind it, and it should not be treated as one. What it is instead is a tool that does one job, does it without asking anything of you, and tells you where it stops.
Read before you trust it
The most useful page on this site is the one describing what the encryption does not protect against. If you are deciding whether to put something sensitive through this, read that first — and then check it yourself in your browser’s developer tools, which the page explains how to do.
Tell us where we are wrong
A claim about encryption is only worth anything if it survives being checked. If you find a flaw in the design, an overstatement in the copy, or a bug in the product, we would rather hear it than not:hello@onlineclipboards.com. Security reports get read first — there is a short note on how to send one on the contact page.