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Jun 4, 2026 · 4 min read

A quick tour of exl.ink (and what's coming)

exl.ink is a little collection of tools that do one thing each, don't ask you to sign in, and don't keep anything around afterwards. You can use every one of them from a browser tab, a curl command, or a script — whatever's closest. This is a quick walk through what's here today, and a note on where it's going.

The idea

Most of these already exist somewhere as a heavyweight service with an account, a dashboard, and a free tier that runs out. We wanted the opposite: open a page, do the thing, close the tab. Nothing sits in a database because there isn't one — files and messages live in memory (or briefly on disk) and get swept away on a timer or when the server restarts. No account, no tracking, no cookie banner.

That has a nice side effect: there's almost nothing to leak. If we don't keep it, it can't show up later.

Moving things around

  • One-time file link — drop a file, get a link that works exactly once, then deletes itself. Optionally encrypted in your browser, so we only ever see ciphertext.
  • HTTP pipe — stream bytes straight from one machine to another with two curl commands. Like netcat, but over plain HTTP, so it goes through almost anything.
  • Short link — a throwaway short URL that expires after a while, or after a set number of clicks.

Catching and watching traffic

  • Tunnel — a temporary public URL that relays HTTP back to your machine. Good for catching webhooks or showing someone a localhost server, with no port-forwarding and nothing to install.
  • Request bin — a URL that records every request sent to it, so you can read the headers and body. Handy for the webhook that's “definitely firing” but you can't prove it.
  • Pub/sub channel — POST a message and every subscriber gets it instantly over Server-Sent Events.
  • Disposable inbox — a throwaway email address that catches incoming mail. Read the message (and any one-time code in it), then let it disappear.

Looking from the outside

Some things your own machine simply can't tell you — it needs a second vantage point with a public address.

  • Connection inspector — what the internet actually sees about you: IP, reverse DNS, rough location, the request as received.
  • Port checker — is a port on your connection reachable from outside? The server dials back to find out.
  • Uptime + TLS — fetch a URL from the outside and report status, redirects, latency, and how many days are left on its certificate.
  • DNS toolkit — resolve a record across three public resolvers at once to see if it's propagated, or audit a domain's SPF, DMARC, and DKIM.

Small dev utilities

The quick stuff you reach for mid-task and don't want to install. These run entirely in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere:

Two more

  • One-time secret — share a password or note as an encrypted link that burns the moment it's read.
  • Scheduled callback — have the server fire one HTTP request later, even after your own machine has gone to sleep.

Three ways to use any of it

Everything works the same three ways: click around in the browser, run a one-line curl, or call it from a script. If you're wiring exl.ink into something automated (an AI agent included), llms.txt has the whole thing written out as a plain-text API.

The catch

It's free, and the limits are deliberately modest — enough for real work, not enough to run your infrastructure on. If you bump into them you can raise the limits with a small one-time pass paid in crypto, no account attached. And because everything is ephemeral, don't lean on it for anything you can't afford to lose. Short horizons only.

More to come

This is the set we have now, not the set we're stopping at. There's a list of tools that fit the same shape — small, no login, gone afterwards — that we'll add over time, and we'll write them up here as they land. If there's something you keep wishing existed, that's genuinely useful to know.

That's the tour. Open a tab and try the one you came for.