Casey Vale
I build and maintain pastesite.com, and I write the guides and comparisons on this site. They exist because most pastebin advice is written by someone who has never had to explain why a password-protected link is not the same thing as encryption, or why a paste that expired last Tuesday is not in a backup.
The byline is a pen name; the site is run by one person. Everything claimed here about the product can be checked against the product itself, and corrections go to an inbox that a person reads.
What I write about
The guides are about doing one thing correctly: moving a block of text from one person to another without leaking something, losing it, or leaving it online longer than intended. In practice that means paste sites themselves, expiring and burn-after-read links, password-protected sharing, and the redaction pass that should happen before a config file leaves a laptop.
The comparisons are written to be usable by someone who has already decided pastesite is not the right tool. If a git host, a document editor or a screenshot is the better answer for the job, the page says so.
How these pages are kept honest
Three things are enforced by the build rather than promised in a paragraph:
- Dates are real. The date on each page is the date its content last changed — not the date it was deployed. A routine rebuild that changes nothing leaves it alone, so an "updated" line here means something.
- Numbers come from the product. The price and plan limits are read from the same data the app uses, and the pages that state our retention and rate-limit commitments are compared against the code that enforces them on every build. Copy that drifts from the code fails the build.
- Nothing is sponsored. There are no affiliate links or paid placements on the alternatives pages. A list that is paid for is not a comparison.
What that does not buy you: I cannot test another company's product the way I can test this one. Where a comparison depends on how someone else's site behaves, the page says when it was last checked and links to their own documentation.
Corrections
If a guide is wrong — a limit that changed, a feature that was removed, a claim that no longer holds — email support@pastesite.com with the page and the sentence. Corrections change the page and its date; they are not quietly edited out of a changelog nobody reads.
Start here
Where the format came from and what it is for.
Paste links versus gists versus screenshots.
How expiry and burn-after-read differ, and when to use each.
What hashing does and does not protect.
Compare paste sites by use case, without hype.
The design choices behind the site.
Frequently asked questions
Who runs pastesite.com?
Casey Vale builds and maintains the site, writes its guides, and handles the support and abuse reports that arrive through the contact page.
Are the guides written by the person who built the product?
Yes. That is the point of them: the numbers and behaviour described are taken from the product itself, rather than summarised from other articles.