FAQ for ContextFAQ for ContextThis website allows you to quickly share rich-text contextual pastes with friends or coworkers of what you're reading on the web. (Watch a demo video on YouTube.)
You can copy-paste selected text or images from websites directly on the home page and create pastes with a single click, or use our browser extensions mentioned below for better accuracy of copied styles and with the least effort.
You can use this to share context of what you're seeing on your screen, including your personalized ranking on various websites, sensitive interview feedback, code snippets from Terminal.
For web developers, you can even share mockups after you've modified the DOM without resorting to screenshots.
For short-term pastes under a day, we store the contents in memory (using memcached). For longer term pastes, we store them on a cloud storage bucket with automatic expiry after some fixed duration.
We don't log any of the contents. And we don't keep things around when they expire.
It means viewing of your paste is restricted to the people sharing the same IP address as the person that created it. This is great for sharing within an office or corporate network. IP lock is part of the Pro option below.
Pro is our $1-per-paste upgrade, chosen by selecting "30 days with Pro" when creating a paste. Your paste lasts 30 days, and the Pro options appear right in the form: a custom name in the link, password protection, restriction to your origin IP, and delete — pull the paste at any point in its 30-day life.
Free pastes (5 minutes to 1 day) stay exactly as simple as before: paste, pick an expiry, share the link.
Yes — every paste has robot-readable twins. The "Copy link for agent" button at the bottom of a paste page copies the Markdown version of the link, ready to hand to an AI agent (or anything that prefers clean text). You can also append .txt, .md, or .json to the paste URL yourself. These render the same content with no ads or page chrome.
The .json twin doubles as a simple read API for scripts and AI agents: it returns the content plus ttl, created, and expires_at fields. For example: curl https://ctxt.io/3/YOURKEY.json
The twins respect the same access rules as the paste page — IP locks and passwords apply there too.
Yes — ctxt.io is a hosted MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. Connect
https://ctxt.io/mcp to Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, or VS Code and your agent can create,
read, and delete expiring share links directly — diffs, logs, code snippets, docs. Free expiries work with
no account; the $1 Pro tier is available through a checkout link. Setup takes one command:
see the MCP setup page.
Setting a password (a Pro option on the home page) makes viewers enter it before they can read the paste — including the raw .md/.txt/.json views. We store only a salted hash of the password, never the password itself, and password-protected pastes are excluded from search engines.
To be clear: this is an access gate, not end-to-end encryption. The paste contents are still stored in plain form on our servers until they expire, so treat it as a lock on the door rather than a sealed envelope. Don't share secrets that would be catastrophic if our storage were compromised.
You can combine a password with "Origin IP access only" — viewers then need both the right network and the password.
Short-term pastes (5 minutes to 1 day) are free. The Pro option costs $1 per paste and includes 30-day retention along with the advanced features described above.
Not everything styled about the page or snippet you copy can be captured. We are working on continuously improving these with our browser extensions.
For Firefox users, Firefox currently doesn't copy CSS styles applied from stylesheets (unlike other Webkit browsers such as Chrome or Safari), so you need to use the browser extension mentioned below and not the text field.
Also, we disable JavaScript execution on pastes for security reasons (and to be good netizens) and some elements on the original page may be styled or have their styles modified using executed JavaScript.
Some fonts and CSS files also have restrictive Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policies, but we have plans in place to improve this.
Plain code pasted into the text field is syntax-highlighted automatically when we're confident it's code (we never recolor prose or rich text that has its own styling). Viewers can turn the coloring off — and back on — by clicking the language badge at the bottom of the paste page.
To keep your editor's own highlighting instead, copy the code with HTML formatting or syntax. Some code editors require plugins to do this. Here are the plugins for Atom, VS Code, and SublimeText.
Our Chrome browser extension doesn't require any special permissions at all. Our Firefox browser extension does currently require the <all_urls> permission to post content, and we haven't found a way around it.
We do not inject any content scripts on any of your pages/tabs. We do not perform anything passively behind the scenes.
For security reasons, all JavaScript from the original website the content is copied from is disabled or deleted. The pastes are meant to only display their contents visually and not interactively.
If this is something that you'd like to have, please let us know.
There are other tools that can do screenshots, and their drawbacks are: it's hard to take one of a scrolling web page without a browser extension, screenshots take up more space and bandwidth, you can't copy-paste text out of an image, you can't inspect the HTML document object model (DOM), and these services are not usually designed to be ephemeral.
However, nothing can beat the accuracy of screenshots and the fact they'll work on any page. We have plans to offer this soon, but let us know if you'd like this feature.
Currently we don't offer any reliability guarantees as we offer this service for free or very low cost. If you'd like guaranteed reliability, please let us know.
If you created the paste, a "Delete this" link appears next to "Report this" at the bottom right — from the same device or network you created it on — and removes it immediately.
To report someone else's content, use the "Report this" link and we shall look into it swiftly.
Also, all content eventually expires relatively quickly and the content URLs are long and unguessable, so you can also wait for the paste to expire.
There have been many times we've wanted to quickly share the contents of webpages we have access to ("for context"), e.g. interview feedback or personalized rankings we were looking at, and we wanted them to share them effortlessly while having them also expire quickly after sharing.
Pasting into email, Google Docs, downloading the page as HTML and uploading to a web host all had their drawbacks.