Reference

Expiry

Anonymous drops live 30 days, then stay offline but privately claimable for 30 more; free-account drops live 90 days, subscriber drops live forever, and ?ttl= overrides either direction within plan limits. This page is what “expired” actually means mechanically.

On this page

The short answer: anonymous drops live 30 days, then sit offline but claimable for 30 more, then are purged. Free-account drops live 90 days; subscriber drops have no expiry unless you set one. Either kind restores up to 90 days past expiry. Claiming extends a drop — it never makes a page permanent; only a paid named drop drops the TTL entirely.

Where the deadline lives

Every expiring drop carries its deadline as object metadata, and the deploy response’s expires_at echoes it (null means never). While a drop is live, the deadline is also exposed on every response via the x-drop-expires header:

bash

curl -I https://vast-juice-c2dse.ship.place/
HTTP/2 200
content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8
cache-control: public, max-age=60
x-drop-expires: 2026-06-19T14:00:00.000Z

Past the deadline

At the deadline every expiring drop answers 410 Gone. An anonymous drop remains privately claimable for 30 days: whoever holds its spc_… claim token can recover it (dashboard → Drops → claim, POST /drops/<slug>/claim, or the claim_drop MCP tool) into a 90-day free-account lifetime. Owned files are retained for 90 days, and the owner can restore from the dashboard or via POST /drops/<slug>/restore: free accounts and subscribers both restore through day 90; a free restore gets a new 90-day lifetime, a subscriber restore removes the expiry. Past those windows, the files are gone for good. The endpoints behind all of this live in Managing drops.

Warning emails

Signed-in accounts get one email about 48 hours before an owned drop expires, with its expiry time and restore options — redeploy, claim or restore starts a fresh drop lifetime and a fresh warning. Toggle it under dashboard → Settings → Drop-expiry reminders (on by default). Anonymous drops can’t be warned (there’s no address to reach), and drops without an expiry never trigger one.

Cleanup

A sweep runs every five minutes, querying the drop index for entries past their window — 30 days of private recovery for anonymous drops, 90 days of retention for owned ones — and deleting their files in batches, no bucket scans. Every expired drop serves 410 from the deadline on; only a valid claim or restore can bring it back.

Unprotected drops are edge-cached for at most 60 seconds, with cache lifetime clamped to the drop deadline so cached content does not outlive expiry. Password-protected drops bypass caching.

Keeping things alive

Claiming an anonymous drop gives it a 90-day free-account lifetime — that works before the deadline and during the 30-day private recovery window. Owned drops that already expired can be restored from the dashboard within the retention window. Beyond that there’s no “extend” call — redeploy with a fresh ?ttl= instead. Claiming extends a lifetime; it does not make a page permanent — removing expiry entirely is a paid named-drop feature. Subscribers redeploying a named drop keep the same URL while resetting content and lifetime in one shot.

Last updated Jun 12, 2026