Hosted on handbill.dev

Publishing on handbill.dev needs a GitHub account and nothing else — no Cloudflare account, no DNS records, no token to mint by hand.

npm i -g handbill
handbill login
handbill plan.html
# https://a3f9c1d4e2b8.handbill.dev

Free to start, and by publishing here you accept the terms and acceptable use — short, and blunt about what the operator can see.

How login works

handbill login prints a short code and opens github.com/login/device, where you approve the “handbill CLI” GitHub App. The CLI exchanges GitHub’s answer for a handbill key exactly once, writes the key to ~/.config/handbill/config.json with mode 0600, and throws GitHub’s token away. The key is what publishes from then on; the server keeps only its SHA-256, so a dump of the store mints nothing. handbill logout revokes it and deletes it again.

What handbill learns about you is your numeric GitHub id. That is the entire account — gh:4242, which is what every page you publish is filed under. Not your username (ids survive renames), not your email, not your repositories, no password anywhere. There is no browser session and no cookie on this domain: signing in happens in your terminal, and the site you are reading has no login at all. handbill account --web is the one page that shows your account in a browser, and it keeps that true — the CLI puts the key in the URL’s fragment, which no server ever receives, and the page takes it out of the address bar and holds it in memory until the tab closes.

GitHub is a dependency of signing in and of nothing else. If GitHub is down you cannot mint a new key; publishing, reading and unpublishing carry on.

What you get

Two tiers per account, free and paid:

Limit	free	paid
Pages per day	25, resetting at UTC midnight	250
Stored bytes	250 MB	5 GB
Per page	5 MB	5 MB

Paid is $8 a month or $80 a year, and buys those two numbers and nothing else — pricing has the detail, including what happens when a subscription lapses. Nothing on the read path ever asks whether a page’s owner is paying.

handbill account            # owner, tier, and what today has spent
handbill account --upgrade  # a checkout URL for this account, --open to open it
handbill account --web      # the same account in the browser

Past either of the first two limits, publishing answers 429 QuotaExceeded naming the limit, what it allows, and — for the daily one — when it resets. They are ceilings rather than exact counts: a burst of publishes at once can slip a little past before the counter catches up, never short of it. Unpublishing gives the stored bytes back; it does not refund the day’s page count.

How it differs from self-hosting

	Hosted	Self-hosted
Where a page lives	<hash>.handbill.dev	your own zone
Setup	handbill login	one Worker, one bucket, two DNS records
Limits	the table above	your Cloudflare bill
Who can read a page	anyone with the link, and whoever runs handbill.dev	anyone with the link, and you
Living names	not available	yours, opt-in
Who can remove a page	you, or the operator on an abuse report	you

Living names are operator-only here on purpose: a word on a shared domain is a word someone else wants, and login.handbill.dev in a stranger’s hands is a phishing kit. Hosted publishing is hash URLs, full stop — set up your own zone if you want names.

Everything else is identical, because it is the same code: same CLI, same /v1 contract, same immutable noindex headers on the served page. The hosted deployment is this repository’s Worker with its KV namespaces bound — ACCOUNTS for keys, the page index and the counters, and ALIASES, which is separate and is why the operator has names here when you do not — and moving between hosted and your own is one line in ~/.config/handbill/config.json:

{ "endpoint": "https://api.yourdomain.dev", "token": "…" }

Self-hosting stays the first-class path. Hosted mode exists so you can hand someone a page two minutes after installing the CLI, not to become the place your links have to live. Links on a domain you own outlive whoever is running this one — the self-hosting guide is about ten minutes, once.

Something wrong with a page here? Report it.