FAQ

The core pastebin is free forever and shows no ads: creating, sharing, encryption, expiry options, the API, and the Toolbox all cost nothing. Pastepile Pro is an optional subscription that adds advanced workflows (encrypted drop boxes, threshold pastes, dead-man's switches) and pro API keys with bigger pastes, higher rate limits, and never-expiring keyed saves.

No. There is no sign-up. When you create a paste you get an edit key shown once; keep it if you want to edit or delete the paste later.

Yes. Every paste is created with a one-shot edit key shown to you once at creation time. Anyone holding that edit key can edit or delete the paste. Save it somewhere safe; if you lose it we cannot recover it. Pastes are also deleted automatically when they hit their chosen expiry, and burn-after-read pastes self-destruct on the first view.

No. Every paste page carries noindex, so pastes do not appear in search engines regardless of visibility. Unlisted is the default: the paste is not listed anywhere and is reachable only by its direct link. If you deliberately mark a paste Public, it is listed on the homepage and in the on-site public archive, where anyone can browse its title and content preview, but it still is not indexed by search engines. For private content, keep it Unlisted, add a password, use end-to-end encryption, or seal it as a time capsule.

For regular pastes, yes - they are stored as plain text in our database so we can serve them back to you. For end-to-end encrypted pastes, no: the decryption key lives in the URL fragment (after #), which browsers never send to the server. We store only ciphertext.

Until their expiry, until you delete them with your edit key, or - if you chose burn-after-read - until the first view. An hourly job deletes expired pastes.

Pastepile highlights 267 programming languages, markup formats, and config files. See the full list at /languages. Pastepile also auto-detects the language from your filename when you upload.

A paste that cannot be opened until a future time you pick. It uses the public drand timelock beacon - nobody, including us, can decrypt it before the unlock time.

A named, ordered collection of pastes behind one link, created at /pile. Up to 50 pastes per pile, free, no account, unlisted by default. A pile stores only which pastes belong together; every paste keeps its own passwords, expiry, and encryption, and encrypted pastes' keys never touch the server.

Yes. The public REST API needs no account and covers create, read, list, update, and delete. There is also a CLI (npm i -g pastepile), a VS Code extension, and a GitHub Action, all talking to the same API.

Yes. The Pastepile MCP server connects Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, and any Model Context Protocol client, so an assistant can save knowledge during one session and retrieve it in the next. One command to install; full documentation at /docs/mcp.

A free workspace at /tools with dozens of offline developer tools: Base64, URL, and hex encoding, hashing, JSON and CSV formatting, JWT decoding, timestamps, UUID generation, and more. Everything runs in your browser with no network round-trip, and tools can be chained into saved workflows.

Every paste page has a Report option in its More menu. For things you cannot flag in-page, see /abuse. Copyright claims go to /dmca.

Not currently. It is not self-hostable today.