Hi Product Hunt — I’m Marjan, the person behind PrivateNote. I started building PrivateNote because I wanted something like it myself. I often need to send a password, API key, document, or other sensitive information to someone. The usual choices never felt quite right: send it through email or chat and leave a copy sitting there, or use a one-time-note service and trust how it handles the secret. I work in cryptography and security, so I started looking more closely at what could be done entirely in the browser. Modern browser cryptography gives us much better building blocks than when many of the original “burn after reading” services were designed. With PrivateNote, encryption happens on the client and the decryption key stays in the URL fragment, so the server storing the encrypted note never needs to receive the key. What started as a very simple encrypted text note gradually became something I actually wanted to use every day: files and photos, recording audio and video directly into an encrypted note, expiration, open notifications, passwords, recipient verification codes, and different ways to control how something is revealed. Recipient verification was particularly important to me. A password adds protection, but a human-chosen password can still be guessed or brute-forced. Requiring access to the intended recipient’s email adds another independent barrier when something is especially sensitive. Private AI came from a different experiment I wanted to try: how useful can small open-source models running directly in the browser actually be? Instead of sending the note you’re writing to an AI provider, supported devices can run the model locally. I think there’s an interesting intersection between browser capabilities, privacy, and useful AI that is only starting to become practical. The project evolved from “send a secret once” into a broader experiment in how much of a secure sharing workflow we can move to the client while keeping it simple for the recipient. I’d especially love feedback on that balance. Does PrivateNote still feel simple, or have I added too much? And if you already share passwords or sensitive files with colleagues or clients, what do you use today?

PrivateNote.ai

Share sensitive information without leaving it behind

Share sensitive information without leaving it behind