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Your photos, backed up into a bucket you own.

Pailcoming to Google Play

Someone else's cloud.

Your photos live in a feed you can't export, under filenames you can't read, behind a subscription you can't leave. Pail is a different idea: there is no Pail cloud. The storage is yours.

No account. No server.

Pail has no sign-in and asks for no email address. There is no Pail server holding a login, a user table or a database about you — the app talks to your storage provider and to nobody else.

  • Your bucket is the account. A second phone joins by using the same bucket keys and prefix.
  • The catalog — which photo is in which album — is written into your own bucket, never to a server of ours.
  • Nothing to sign up for, and nothing for us to delete, leak or lose.

Bring your own storage.

Point Pail at a bucket you already own — you enter the endpoint, region, bucket, prefix and keys once.

  • AWS S3
  • Backblaze B2
  • Cloudflare R2
  • Wasabi
  • MinIO
  • anything that speaks S3

Those credentials stay on your phone, in the platform keychain. There is no Pail server to send them to — photos go straight from your phone to your bucket.

The bucket connection form: endpoint, region, bucket, prefix and keys
The bucket connection form.

Albums are folders.

Every original lands at an address you can read: pail/iceland-2026/IMG_4402.jpg. Open your bucket in any S3 client and everything is where you expect — with or without Pail installed.

your bucket — aws s3 ls6 objects
  1. 09-08pail/iceland-2026/IMG_20260908_164000.jpg3.1 MB
  2. 09-08pail/iceland-2026/IMG_20260908_152900.jpg2.4 MB
  3. 09-08pail/iceland-2026/IMG_20260908_141800.jpg2.9 MB
  4. 09-07pail/iceland-2026/IMG_20260907_164000.jpg3.6 MB
  5. 09-07pail/iceland-2026/IMG_20260907_104500.jpg2.7 MB
  6. 09-06pail/iceland-2026/IMG_20260906_115600.jpg2.2 MB
Pail's library: the album as a grid of photographs
pail/iceland-2026/IMG_20260908_164000.jpg
Pail — the same album.

Dim the screen while it works.

A long backup means a bright screen doing nothing. Rest mode blacks the screen out and keeps the count going, then hands your brightness back on tap.

Uploads run while Pail is open. If you leave, the run stops — whatever already uploaded stays in your bucket.

Rest mode: the blacked-out screen with a live upload count
Rest mode, mid-backup.

Send anything to Pail.

Pail sits in the Android share sheet. A photo someone sends you can go straight to your bucket — no detour through the gallery, and the file needn't be in your photo library at all.

Pail in the Android share sheet, beside the real uploads screen
Illustration: the share sheet is drawn; the uploads screen is the real app.

Free, forever.

No trial, no locked feature, no upload cap. Nothing in the app checks whether you've paid.

There is one optional one-time purchase — pail_lifetime. It unlocks nothing. It exists to support development, and that is the whole business model.

What Pail does not do.

  • Uploads run only while Pail is open. Leave, and the run stops.
  • Android only, built for phones today. No tablet, iOS, desktop or web.
  • No end-to-end encryption of photo content — photographs are stored as your provider stores them.
  • No "unlimited storage". The storage is yours, and you pay for it.
  • No sharing by link, and no family accounts — there is no server to hold them.
  • Pail cannot recover data from a bucket it cannot reach — and with no account, there is no copy of your keys to restore.