peeza — how it works

The path a file takes

A light native app drives a background engine that owns every transfer. The engine negotiates a connection to the other side through a small relay, then moves the file directly when it can.

┌─────────────┐   localhost    ┌─────────────┐     signaling      ┌──────────────┐
│ Native app  │ ─────────────▶ │   engine    │ ◀────────────────▶ │ relay server │
│  (desktop)  │   token auth   │ (background)│  connection setup  │   (cloud)    │
└─────────────┘                └─────────────┘                    └──────────────┘
                                      │  ╔══════ direct peer-to-peer ══════╗
                                      └─ ║   or blind relay when blocked   ║ ─▶ other machine
                                         ╚═════════════════════════════════╝

The relay's job is signaling — helping the two sides find each other — and, only when a direct path is impossible, forwarding bytes it cannot read. It never stores a file.

01Why the relay can't read your files

This is the part that matters most. Every transfer is encrypted with a key the server never receives.

The key lives in the link, not our database

When you create a share, your machine generates a per-share AES-256-GCM key and puts it in the link's fragment: g.peeza.app/7XK4M2QD#k=…. Browsers never send the part after # to a server — it stays on the two devices. The relay sees the room, not the key.

Encrypt-then-forward. Chunks are sealed on the sender and opened on the receiver. Anything in between — including our relay — handles ciphertext only.
Directed sends stay blind too. Sending to your own devices uses per-machine X25519 keypairs and sealed-key envelopes, so the relay can route without ever holding a key.
Local pairing. The first time two devices connect over the network, both sides confirm a matching 6-digit code — after that the peer is pinned and trusted. Devices already paired through your account skip it.

What the relay does keep is routing metadata, never file contents: your account, your devices' public keys, and one-time share links that expire after 48 hours. IP addresses are used only in memory for rate limiting — never written to disk, never logged. Full detail in our privacy policy.

02Any size, constant memory

peeza streams. It never loads a whole file to send it, so a 400 GB folder uses about as much memory as a 4 MB one.

Files are read off disk in small chunks, encrypted, and sent one at a time — memory stays flat at any size.
A folder is zipped to a point-in-time snapshot, so editing the source mid-transfer can't corrupt what's in flight.
Downloads are written to a partial file on disk, so a receiver never assembles the whole thing in RAM either.

03Resumable by default

Transfers are state on disk, not a live process you have to babysit.

peeza keeps transfer state and partial downloads on disk. Close the window, quit the app, reboot the machine — when both sides are back, the transfer resumes from the last byte written, not from zero.

04Staying direct

The relay is a fallback, not the default. peeza works to keep transfers on a direct path, because direct is faster — and, for you, unlimited.

STUN redundancy discovers each side's public address through several servers, improving the odds of a clean hole-punch.
At startup, peeza tries to pin a port on your router with UPnP / NAT-PMP and advertises it as an extra candidate — best-effort, and you can switch it off.
On the same network? Switch on Nearby and peeza finds other Peezas on your Wi-Fi and transfers directly. No relay, no internet, no login.

05Compliant by design

The easiest data to protect is data you never hold. peeza's architecture is data minimization taken to its logical end — which is exactly what modern privacy law asks for, and the safest bet on whatever law comes next.

Nothing stored, nothing exposed. Files never land on our servers, so there is no stored copy to breach, leak, or hand over — and no retention schedule to manage.
Privacy by design and data minimization — the principles at the heart of the GDPR — are peeza's architecture, not a policy layered on top: end-to-end encryption everywhere, file contents we cannot read, IP addresses only ever in memory.
No cross-border storage questions. Your file streams from one machine to the other instead of sitting in a foreign data center, so data-residency rules have almost nothing to attach to.
Ready for the future by default. AI-training clauses, new retention limits, tomorrow's regulations — a service that cannot read your files and does not store them has nothing to re-engineer. There is no data to regulate.