Terms
Plain English, not a legal document
These are the terms of using the copy of Transfer Me It that runs at transferme.it. They are written to be read rather than to be exhaustive. If you run your own server, none of this applies to you: the code is yours under its own licence, and the rules are yours to set.
What the service is
Transfer Me It moves a file from one Mac to another. Your Mac encrypts the file before it leaves, and the server holds the encrypted bytes until the other Mac collects them or twenty four hours pass, whichever comes first.
There is no account. Your identity is a key pair your Mac generates and keeps in its Keychain. There is no email address to hand over, no password to remember, and no credential of yours sitting on our server for somebody else to steal.
What it costs
The service is free to use. On the free tier a single file can be up to 500 MB, a device can send 5 GB a day and 50 GB a month, and the three words it hands out expire ten minutes after they are issued. The limits exist so that one person cannot spend the bandwidth of everybody else. The current numbers are shown in the app under Settings, and they may change.
The server also carries a paid tier, held as a credit balance against a device. A balance of 500 cents or more raises the limits to 5 GB a file, 50 GB a day and 500 GB a month, extends the code lifetime to an hour, and allows two kinds of code that do not rotate: a permanent one, and a custom one whose words you choose. Requesting either without the balance is refused.
There is no way to buy credit. No payment is taken in the app or on this site, and no payment processor is connected. Until that changes, every device is on the free tier and the paid limits are unreachable, so nothing here is being sold to you.
Credit is recorded against a device rather than a person. There is no mechanism to move it to another device, so it goes when that device's Keychain identity goes, in the same way transfers do.
What is expected of you
- Send only files you have the right to send.
- Do not use the service to distribute anything unlawful, or anything designed to harm the person receiving it.
- Do not attempt to work around the limits, mint identities in bulk, or otherwise take more of the service than one person's share.
- Do not attempt to interfere with the service or with anybody else's transfers.
Access can be withdrawn from a device that does these things. Given the design, that means blocking a device, not reading anybody's files.
What the encryption does and does not mean
Files are encrypted on your Mac and can only be opened by the Mac you sent them to. That is a property of the construction rather than a promise about behaviour, and you can read how it works and check it yourself.
It does not mean the service is a safe place to store anything. It is not storage. Transfers are deleted after twenty four hours, whether or not they were collected. Keep your own copy of anything you care about.
It also does not hide who is talking to whom. The server can see the size and timing of transfers, and which device sent to which. Those limits are set out on the security page.
What we cannot do for you
There is no account recovery, because there is no account. If your Mac loses its Keychain identity, that identity is gone, and the transfers held for it are gone with it. Nobody can recover them, including us, because the key that opened them lived only on your Mac.
Files that expire are deleted. They cannot be brought back.
No warranty
The service is provided as it is, with no guarantee that it will be available, that a transfer will arrive, or that it will arrive in time. It is run on a best effort basis, and it can stop at any point. Do not build anything on it that cannot survive it being gone.
To the extent the law allows, no liability is accepted for loss arising from using it, including a file that did not arrive, arrived late, or expired before it was collected.
The software itself
The app and the server are open source. Their licence is in the repository and it governs the code. These terms cover the hosted service at transferme.it, not the code.
Changes
These terms may change. The current version is always the one on this page, and its history is public in the repository, so what changed and when is a matter of record rather than a claim.
This is a plain description written by the people who built the service. It is not legal advice and it has not been reviewed by a lawyer.