December 5, 2025
Paste wars: cloud vs self
Show HN: Pbnj – A minimal, self-hosted pastebin you can deploy in 60 seconds
Pastebin in 60 seconds—cool, but is it really “self‑hosted”
TLDR: pbnj offers a tiny paste site you can launch fast, mainly via a Cloudflare one‑click deploy. Fans love the simplicity, but the comments explode over whether that counts as self‑hosting, liability for public uploads, and requests for a Cloudflare‑free option—control vs convenience in one neat package.
A new DIY paste site called pbnj promises “deploy in 60 seconds” and a tiny, no‑nonsense way to share text with a simple link. The crowd cheered the minimal vibe and one‑click setup, but the moment they saw the big “Deploy to Cloudflare” button, the mood flipped. Is this self‑hosted or just cloud‑hosted cosplay? That’s the spicy thread of the day.
One fan dreamed of turning it into a personal blog, but slammed the brakes over who’s responsible for whatever strangers paste. Another demanded a how‑to without Cloudflare, while a purist dropped the mic: “Cloudflare is not self hosting.” Cue the semantic battle: self‑hosted means you run it yourself… but does running it on someone else’s infrastructure count? Meanwhile, the dev’s cost math leans on Cloudflare’s free tier and a cheeky aside—“they might charge us eventually.” The audience replies with a classic meme: free today, surprise bill tomorrow.
Despite the drama, folks love the vibes: clean web UI, a simple config file, API and CLI you can use with a single key, and a one‑click deploy that forks your repo and gets you live. But the community wants one more button: “Deploy without Cloudflare.” Until then, the paste wars rage on, powered by convenience vs control and a lot of snack‑time puns (Cloudflare).
Key Points
- •pbnj is a minimal, self-hosted pastebin for sharing code and text via simple URLs.
- •Write operations across API, CLI, and web require a Bearer token (AUTH_KEY).
- •API includes a Create Paste endpoint at POST /api with JSON requests (e.g., via curl).
- •Deployment is offered via a one-click “Deploy to Cloudflare” GitHub button that forks the repo.
- •Cost model references Cloudflare D1 free tier: 500 MB storage, 5M reads/day, and 100,000 writes.