nowfound

Dev tools · July 14, 2022

Payload – Cross-platform desktop app for LAN file transfers

Hi HN. I built Payload to make file transfers easy for less-technical users who need large/fast transfers, so I have focused on auto-discovery, drag-and-drop, visually distinct device icons. It's using Tauri (an "Electron alternative" built on Rust) which keeps my binaries small and bundles to .msi, .dmg, .deb and .appimage. No CLI, iOS or Android support (yet). The network stack is a separate binary written in Go. It uses mDNS for local network discovery and TLS over TCP or Quic, with a public Ed25519 keypair for each device. The protocol is ad-hoc and symmetrical control stream using…

Payload – Cross-platform desktop app for LAN file transfers launched on July 14, 2022 with 65 votes, #589 of 2,916 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 4 years on.

Visit payload.app ↗Alternativestop 20% of July 2022

In plain words

Payload is a desktop application for transferring files quickly across local networks. It is designed for non-technical users and emphasizes ease of use through automatic device discovery, drag-and-drop functionality, and clear visual indicators. The app runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, uses encrypted connections with TLS, and is built with Rust and Go for efficient performance.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Device-to-device file transfers, both nearby and online. No size limits, secure, and incredibly fast.

Directly from one device to another. Intuitive, secure and incredibly fast. FREE FOREVER Nearby When you’re on the same local network. Discover nearby devices automatically. For homes, small offices & coworking spaces. FREE Online Transfer with anyone, anywhere and deliver on time. Share a link to connect with people in seconds. Transfer at the full speed of your internet connection. Large Media All file sizes are welcome (but Payload secretly prefers terabytes of raw video). Payload runs on desktops, laptops, smartphones and even tablets. Accelerated transfer speeds, as fast as your network allows. All transfers are end-to-end encrypted. Nobody else can see your files, including us. If a…from payload.app

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi HN. I built Payload to make file transfers easy for less-technical users who need large/fast transfers, so I have focused on auto-discovery, drag-and-drop, visually distinct device icons. It's using Tauri (an "Electron alternative" built on Rust) which keeps my binaries small and bundles to .msi, .dmg, .deb…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust2025 · desktopdocs.com · ▲597

    A year ago, my co-founder launched Desktop Docs here on HN. It's a Mac app we built with Electron that uses CLIP embeddings to search photos and videos locally with natural language. We got positive feedback from HN and our first paying customers, but the app was almost 1GB and clunky to use. TLDR; rebuilding in Rust was the right move. So we rewrote the app with Rust and Tauri and here are the results: - App size is 83% smaller: 1GB → 172MB - DMG Installer is 70% smaller: 232MB → 69.5MB - Indexing files is faster: A 38-minute video now indexes in ~3 minutes instead of 10-14 minutes -…

  • Tauri2022 · tauri.app · ▲214

    An Electron alternative written in Rust

  • LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool2021 · landrop.app · ▲250

    Drop any files to any devices on your LAN.

  • PT
  • YS
    YouTransfer – Self-hosted file sharing2015 · youtransfer.io · ▲133
  • An SSH based utility to transfer pipes across machines – beam2025 · github.com · ▲28

    Hey HN, At work, I was annoyed about having to download logs by writing them out to files and transferring them over to my local over HTTP (admittedly, this is because of a rather novel architectural situation). So, I built a tool in Go that lets you pipe contents into an SSH server for sending and reading them out on another connection. You can also use this tool to transfer files. Just cat the file on the sender end and redirect the output of the receiver end to a file. Please note that the transfer rate is heavily dependent on your connection and proximity to the public ssh.beam.camp…

More dev tools this month

the category →
  • /dev/null▲490

    a social network for devs

    Dev tools · 4d ago · dev-null.sh

  • open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Dev tools · 29d ago · github.com

  • Contribute to oosexgang/hackios-xnu-kernel development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Dev tools · 17h ago · github.com

  • Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Dev tools · 27d ago · github.com

  • OpenBot▲362

    Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer

    Dev tools · 24d ago · openbot.run

  • Talanoa▲346

    Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…

    Dev tools · 21d ago · talanoa.email

Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, July 2022

the whole month →
  • Locofy.ai▲720

    Hey there, I am Honey - Co-founder at Locofy. We, along with other makers, have been building Locofy.ai to help massively accelerate the builders - the designers, developers, product managers & founders, and we're excited to share it today with the HN Community. Locofy.ai simply converts designs into production-ready frontend code for web and mobile apps. It adapts to your preferred design tools, tech stack, and workflows with ease and lets you launch upto 4x faster, while letting designers design the way they want and giving high-quality responsive code that developers love. With this…

    Dev tools · 2022 · locofy.ai

  • PO

    Life & fun · 2022 · justine.lol

  • Open Source realtime backend in 1 file. Contribute to pocketbase/pocketbase development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Dev tools · 2022 · github.com

  • ruttl▲552

    Visual & Design Feedback Tool that helps you review design, content and report bugs on websites, applications, PDFs and images.

    Dev tools · 2022 · ruttl.com

  • Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation. I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So…

    Life & fun · 2022 · hexapipes.vercel.app

  • We're building Parsnip to create a "tech tree" of cooking skills that allows anyone to level up on the building blocks of cooking knowledge while tracking their progress over time. It took us a few iterations to figure out the right product; here's the story of our latest pivot: [https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope] The goal is to create a personalized way to learn any recipe on the Internet, then use this as a springboard to help home cooks of all levels solve the problem of repeated meal planning in a 10x better way:…

    Work · 2022 · parsnip.ai