About DownSwift
DownSwift is a free, browser-based downloader for publicly available social media posts. No account, no app to install, and no media files stored on our servers. This page describes exactly what the service does and how it is built.
What DownSwift Is, In Plain Terms
Six facts about the service, each of which you can verify from the pages on this site.
A web tool, not an app
DownSwift runs entirely in your browser. There is nothing to install, no extension to grant permissions to, and no APK to sideload.
Nine supported platforms
TikTok, Instagram, Twitter (X), Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Threads, Xiaohongshu and Douyin. Unsupported links are rejected with an explicit error rather than failing silently.
No media files are stored
DownSwift does not write downloaded videos or images to disk. Media is streamed from the source platform straight through to your browser.
No account, no download history
There is no sign-up, no login and no per-user history. DownSwift has no way to tell you what you downloaded yesterday, because it never recorded it.
A small, conventional stack
Static HTML, CSS and JavaScript at the edge, served by nginx. A Python FastAPI service handles link resolution and media streaming. No proprietary client.
No paid tier
Nothing on DownSwift is gated behind a payment. There is no subscription, no credit system and no download quota.
The Three Layers Behind Every Download
Your browser
A static page collects the link, calls the API, and renders the preview and the quality buttons. All of the interface runs client-side.
The nginx edge
nginx terminates TLS, serves the static pages, and reverse-proxies API calls to the application service. It also applies the cache and security headers.
The FastAPI service
Python resolves the link, identifies the platform, asks the platform's own servers for the media streams, and proxies the bytes back to you with HTTP Range support.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Yes. There is no paid tier and no account system, so there is nothing to upgrade to. Advertising space on the page covers running costs.
No. The service does not write media files to disk and does not keep a per-user history. Only short-lived technical cache entries exist, and they expire automatically.
No. DownSwift is a website. It works in any current browser on desktop and mobile, and it can optionally be added to your home screen as a Progressive Web App.
No, and it is not designed to. DownSwift only resolves media that the platform already serves publicly. Private accounts, login-walled posts and DRM-protected streams are out of scope.
DownSwift is an independently operated website. It is not affiliated with Meta, ByteDance, Reddit, Pinterest or X Corp. For anything you need a human to answer, use the contact page.
What DownSwift stores
This is the question people actually care about, so here is the precise answer.
DownSwift does not persist media. When you download a video, the bytes travel from the source platform's servers through our service to your browser. Nothing is written to a file on our side, and nothing is re-hosted. That is why a download can fail if the source platform removes a post: there is no copy here to fall back on.
What does exist is a small, short-lived technical cache:
- Link results are cached for 10 minutes. If you resolve the same URL twice within that window, the second request is answered from cache. This exists to avoid hammering the source platform, not to build a history.
- Stream request headers are cached for 2 hours. Some platforms only serve
media when a specific
Refereror user-agent is sent. Those headers are stored under a one-way hash of the media URL so the download proxy can reuse them.
Both expire on their own. Neither is tied to a user, an IP address or an account, because DownSwift has no concept of a user.
What DownSwift cannot do
- Private content. If a post is only visible to followers, DownSwift cannot resolve it. That is a deliberate limitation, not a bug.
- DRM-protected streams. Paid video services encrypt their streams. DownSwift does not attempt to defeat that.
- Region-locked media. If the source platform refuses to serve a stream from our servers' region, the download will fail. There is no way around this from our side.
- Re-encoding or upscaling. DownSwift hands you the file the platform already serves. It never transcodes, so it can never invent quality that was not there.
How DownSwift is built
The frontend is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There is no build step, no bundler and no framework, which means the pages you load are the pages we wrote. The edge is nginx, which terminates TLS, serves the static files and reverse-proxies the API. The application service is Python, built on FastAPI.
Media extraction leans on yt-dlp for most platforms, with purpose-built extractors where a platform needs one. Streams are proxied with HTTP Range support, so a download can be resumed instead of restarting from zero.
Reporting a problem
If a link does not work, the most useful thing you can send is the exact URL you tried, the platform, roughly when it happened, and which browser you used. That is usually enough to reproduce it. Head to the contact page for the current channels.
Copyright
DownSwift does not host any media. Files always come from the source platform's own servers. If you are a rights holder and you believe a page on this site is being used in a way it should not be, the contact page explains how to reach us and what to include.
