“Sign up to continue” is often useful for software that needs a long relationship with you. A project tracker needs to remember your projects. A billing app needs to know who gets charged. A team workspace needs permissions, history, and recovery.
Linkside is built for a shorter moment: show your screen to a few people you trust, right now. That does not need an email address, an account password, a profile, or a “log in with Google” button. The host creates a room. Guests open the link. If the host adds a room password, it protects that room only; it is not an account.
No account is not a missing onboarding step. It is part of the product boundary.
What an account would buy
Accounts are useful. If Linkside had them, we could build things like:
- Past rooms. A dashboard with previous sessions, saved settings, and recent links.
- Recovery. If you lost a room link, we could email you or show it after login.
- Saved people. A contact list, trusted guests, and repeat access rules.
- Cross-device continuity. Start on one device, pick up from another without re-sending the link.
- More familiar billing. A normal “your account, your plan, your invoices” shape.
Those are real features. They are also persistence features. They work by teaching the product to remember you.
For many tools, that trade is correct. For Linkside, it pulls against the reason the product exists. A quick screen share should not begin by creating a permanent identity.
What an account brings with it
An account is not just a nicer menu in the corner. It comes with a trail.
- An account needs identifiers. Usually email, name, login provider, creation time, last login, and recovery state.
- An account needs credentials. Passwords, magic links, sessions, resets, lockouts, and abuse controls.
- An account creates a record to protect. Even if the media is never stored, the fact that someone has an account is still data about them.
- An account creates long-term duties. Export, deletion, support, billing questions, and edge cases that do not exist when there is no user profile.
That weight can be worth it for persistent collaboration. It is a bad fit for a tool meant to be closer to saying, “look at this for a second.”
What we trade away
No accounts means some convenience is gone. That should be clear before anyone uses the product.
- No account recovery. If you close or lose a room link, there is no dashboard where Linkside can look it up for you.
- No saved history. There is no “your sessions” page, no room archive, and no log to revisit after a session ends.
- No cross-device profile. A few browser-local settings can stay in that browser, but they do not follow you from laptop to tablet.
- No contact memory. Linkside does not remember who you shared with last time or auto-fill people from past sessions.
- No email convenience. We cannot send you magic links or reminders because we do not ask for your email.
For scheduled team meetings, long-running tutoring, sales pipelines, or anything that benefits from months of history, accounts are often the right shape. Linkside is for the opposite case: small, temporary, link-first screen sharing.
What is free and what is licensed
No account does not mean there is no pricing model. It means pricing is attached to room features and relay use, not to a user profile.
- Direct peer-to-peer screen sharing works without an account or license. Linkside tries to connect browsers directly by default, so the media path is browser to browser.
- Encrypted TURN relay fallback is available when a direct connection fails. Free rooms get a 5-minute relay trial. A license unlocks unlimited relay use.
- Free rooms support up to two active participants and do not support room passwords.
- Licensed rooms support up to four active participants, room passwords, and unlimited relay use.
The license key is still a license key, not a login. Linkside validates it when you use licensed features, such as a room password, a larger room, or relay beyond the free trial. It does not turn into a user profile.
The important distinction is simple: paying can unlock costly or premium room capabilities. It does not require Linkside to build an identity around you.
What Linkside still knows
No account is not the same as invisibility. Linkside still has to operate the session.
The signaling service can observe that a room exists, roughly when guests join, and how long the session lasts. If a TURN relay is needed, the relay sees routing information for encrypted packets. Cloudflare’s edge sees IP-level traffic to the relay endpoints. Those observations are necessary to connect browsers and keep the service running.
What Linkside does not see is the screen content. Media is encrypted in transit by WebRTC. On the direct path, the stream goes browser to browser. On the relay path, the relay forwards encrypted packets; it does not hold the media keys. Linkside also does not record sessions, transcribe audio, analyze screen contents, show ads, or sell data.
That is the trust model in plain English: less identity, temporary rooms, peer-to-peer-first media, encrypted relay when needed, and no stored session content.
What no account makes possible
Removing accounts is not just a privacy posture. It changes the product.
- The first step is the product. Create a room, send the link, start sharing. There is no profile to finish first.
- Rooms stay isolated. Each join gets a fresh room-scoped participant ID. Linkside does not use a stable account ID to follow someone across rooms.
- Sessions can disappear cleanly. Rooms are temporary. When the session ends, the room state moves toward cleanup instead of becoming another line in an account history.
- There is less personal data to guard. No email column, no password database, no contact graph, no long-lived user profile.
This does not make Linkside the right tool for every screen share. It makes it sharper for the one it is trying to serve: a short session with a small group, where the fastest trustworthy path is just a link.
The bet
The bet behind Linkside is that many screen shares need speed and trust more than they need continuity. You already know the person. You already have a way to send them a link. You just need them to see what you see.
An account assumes the relationship should live inside the tool. Linkside assumes the relationship already exists outside it.
If that fits your case, create a room and notice how little has to happen before the screen share starts.