Why BoltShare Shows Ads (and What They Can't See)

You might have noticed a few ads on BoltShare recently. We’d rather explain it than pretend nobody will notice.

The short version

BoltShare costs money to run, and a free tool with no accounts has exactly one way to pay for itself without charging you: ads.

Where the money goes

A lot of people assume a peer-to-peer tool runs for free, since the files go between browsers. That’s partly true. In Direct P2P mode, the heavy lifting really is done by your computer and the receiver’s. But a few pieces still live on servers:

• The signaling server. Every transfer starts with two browsers that don’t know how to find each other. A small server introduces them. It’s cheap per transfer, but it has to be online all the time.
• The Bolt Tunnel relay. This is the expensive one. When a direct connection can’t be made (strict office networks, some mobile carriers), the file streams through our relay instead. Every byte counts as bandwidth on the bill. A single 50 GB transfer over the tunnel is 50 GB in and 50 GB out.
• The website itself, plus monitoring that tells us when transfers are failing so we can fix them.

Bolt Tunnel is the default because it simply works on more networks, and we think that matters more than saving on our bandwidth. But it also means usage and costs go up together.

What we considered instead

We thought about the usual options:

• A paid tier with file size limits on the free plan. We didn’t want to do this. “No size limit” is the whole point of BoltShare, and once you start capping free users, the pressure to keep lowering the cap never goes away.
• Accounts and email sign-ups. Asking for an email so you can send a file feels backwards. It also means storing personal data we don’t otherwise need.
• Donations. We may still add a way to chip in, but donations rarely cover a bandwidth bill on their own.

Ads were the least bad option. They keep the tool free, unlimited and account-free.

What ads can and can’t see

This part is important, so to be precise:

• Ads are loaded by Google AdSense on the BoltShare pages, the same way they load on millions of other sites. Google uses cookies to decide which ads to show, and in some regions it will ask for your consent first. You can turn off personalised ads in Google’s ad settings.
• Ads have no access to your files. Files travel over a separate connection, either browser to browser or through the relay. They never pass through the page in a way an ad script could read, and file names aren’t shared with Google.
• We don’t place ads in the middle of the transfer screen, and we won’t add pop-ups or anything that hijacks the page while you’re sending something.

The full details are in our privacy policy, which we wrote from what the code actually does.

If they get annoying

Tell us. If an ad is broken, misleading, or getting in the way of a transfer, send us a message and we’ll look into it. Ads that get in the way of a transfer would defeat the point, so we’d rather hear about it.