The letter whose photos are not sealed
A MIT capsule on your own Cloudflare account, with the text encrypted and the photos not.
- Category
- Consumer
- Who it is for
- Someone who already has a Cloudflare account and a letter they do not want on a stranger's server.
- Possible model
- Open source
- Difficulty
- Hard
- Inspired by
- timecapsule · timecapsule
- Original launch
- Watch the launch · Nov 2, 2026
Difficulty is an editorial estimate of technical and operational complexity, not a score.
Startup idea analysis by Startup Ideas. Last reviewed Nov 2, 2026. How we read a launch.
The startup idea
Murat posted timecapsule on November 2. A letter to yourself, opened years later. His sat in someone else's database for over 10 years, so he built his own. Free, and encrypted on your own account. The repository is mdeligoz/timecapsule. The license is MIT. It is a self-hosted alternative to FutureMe, and the readme says it is not affiliated. It runs on your own Cloudflare account, on the free plans. There is no subscription. Letters are encrypted with a key the app holds as a Cloudflare secret. Photos and videos sit in a private bucket. The app does not encrypt them. Cloudflare encrypts stored data on its side. A due letter goes out through Resend, with files by a signed link. Send time is a date and a whole hour, at least 7 days and at most 20 years after writing. Recipients are you plus up to 20. Files are 25 MB per letter. The post says encrypted. The readme says the media is not encrypted by the app, and a third party sends the letter. This page did not send one.
The opportunity is the wait, on an account you control. A smaller product is one letter, the 7-day floor, and a line that photos use Cloudflare's encryption, not the app's. A capsule that encrypts the files itself, and never hands them to a mail API, is a different product.
Do not say the photos are sealed by the app. Do not skip Resend.
The problem
A letter you wrote years ago sat in someone else's database.
Who would pay for this?
- Primary
- Someone who already has a Cloudflare account and a letter they do not want on a stranger's server.
- Secondary
- A person who will accept a 7-day minimum and a 25 MB cap.
- Early adopter
- One letter, one date, the media line visible.
How could it make money?
Possible models. Nothing here is a claim about what timecapsule charges.
- No subscription. MIT.
- Cloudflare's free plans.
- Resend is the mail path, and that bill is yours.
What would the MVP look like?
- One letter.
- A 7-day minimum.
- Text encrypted by the app.
- Photos labeled as Cloudflare-at-rest only.
How to validate the idea
- Ask five people whether a photo in the capsule was encrypted by the app.
- If they say yes, they read the post.
- Do not hide the Resend hop.
How to differentiate
- The account is yours.
- The text key is a Cloudflare secret.
- The media is not app-encrypted.
- Do not become FutureMe.
Original product launch
This launch is inspiration and evidence that someone shipped, not a partnership. The idea above is our reading of the broader opportunity. timecapsule did not write it.
- Product
- timecapsule
- Source
- timecapsule
- Film
- timecapsule, the photos are not app-encrypted
- Posted
- Nov 2, 2026 · 0:33
Product that inspired this idea
Murat's post says a letter to yourself sat in someone else's database for over 10 years, so he built timecapsule. Free, and encrypted on your own account. The repository is mdeligoz/timecapsule. The license is MIT. It runs on your own Cloudflare account, on the free plans. Letters are encrypted with a key the app holds as a Cloudflare secret. Photos and videos are not encrypted by the app. Cloudflare encrypts stored data on its side. A due letter goes out through Resend, with files by a signed link. Send time is a whole hour, at least 7 days and at most 20 years out. Recipients are you plus up to 20. Files are 25 MB per letter. The post says encrypted. The readme says the media is not. This page did not send a letter.
Posted by @datcrack. Watch the original launch. No separate product site is listed unless the post itself is the source.
- letters
- self-hosted
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