Why I Built PasteWaves: The 1TB Epiphany
I’m a hobby musician and a bit of a synthesizer geek. I like sharing small audio clips—ideas, patches, rough sketches—with friends. At one point I signed up for SoundCloud just to send playable links. But most alternatives aren’t great. If you send audio over email or messaging apps, it usually gets downloaded, opened somewhere else, and played there. It breaks the flow. I wanted something simpler.
The Car Ride Epiphany
One weekend, driving from Oslo to Gjøvik, I started thinking about it.
How much audio actually fits in 1TB?
Turns out: a lot. An absurd amount, really.
Here’s what made me stop and think:
- 1TB of compressed audio holds roughly 300,000 songs
- At today’s S3 prices, that’s about $23/month in storage costs
- Most people would never come close to filling it
- Yet every platform makes you pay per upload, per minute, per feature
Storage has quietly become almost trivial. This isn’t a hard problem anymore—it’s just that nobody’s bothered to give it away.
That realization changed everything.
Building It
So I started building a simple web app where you can drag in an audio file and get a link back.
The core idea was simple:
- No account required
- No setup friction
- No artificial limits on the free tier
- Just upload and share
I used Claude Code and put together the first version over a weekend. The entire stack runs serverless on AWS—React frontend, Go lambdas, DynamoDB for metadata, S3 for storage. Zero servers to maintain.
What It Became
After that first version worked, I started adding features as I needed them:
- Google OAuth login for permanent storage (25GB for Pro users)
- Subscription tiers with Stripe integration
- Album artwork extraction and display
- Browser-based audio editor with trim, effects, and fades
- Direct recording so you can capture and share from the same place
- Comments system for collaboration
But the free tier stayed generous. Anonymous users get 7 days of storage from a shared 1TB pool. Authenticated free users get 14 days. No credit card, no bullshit.
It started as a small frustration and turned into something I use all the time. If you’ve ever just wanted to send someone a piece of audio without turning it into a whole project—you’ll probably get it.
What’s Next
Right now I’m focused on making the upload experience smoother, improving the player UI, and adding password-protected files for sensitive content.
The goal isn’t to build the next SoundCloud. It’s to stay simple, fast, and generous with storage. Because in 2026, that shouldn’t be a hard ask.
If you’re a musician, producer, podcaster, or just someone who shares audio—give it a try. I built this for people like us.