# ZeroFS

14 Hacker News commenters recommended ZeroFS and 14 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a POSIX filesystem on S3 alone, with no separate database; critics question its latency claims and call it risky for important data.

## Why people recommend it

- Needs only an S3 bucket (3 comments): "outperforms JuiceFS on common small file workloads while only requiring S3 and no 3rd party database" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637828)) "Doesn’t require an external database (just a s3 bucket) and is a single binary." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47673961)) "which doesn’t require a 3rd party database, just a s3 bucket" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47686242))
- Works well with SQLite and Postgres (3 comments): "It works great out the box with SQLite" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46237023)) "SQLite works great with ZeroFS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47686238)) "it works great with Postgres" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46892404))
- Strong POSIX semantics and durability (3 comments): "It uses an LSM-tree database backed by S3, which allows it to implement proper POSIX semantics with actual performance." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46140991)) "ZeroFS has well defined durability semantics, guarantees which are much stronger than local block devices." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46628415)) "zerofs mount has durable fsync and fcntl byte-range locking." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48880698))
- Handles git and Linux-sized repos (2 comments): "Works pretty awesomely with git workloads, even Linux sized trees." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766728)) "it works great on linux-sized repos" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662793))

## What people warn about

- Unclear latency and durability claims (3 comments): "you should remove the “at rest in S3” footnote from the write latency on the frontpage of the website, because that is not what is measured" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763097)) "the fsync is not timed, so this is just the latency of either the network or in kernel file operations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48762523)) "by being unclear about this it just feels like a scam." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48762659))
- Risky to trust with data (2 comments): "it feels a little scary to trust all my files" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876078)) "Entrusting data storage to a vibe coded filesystem seems imprudent." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48761845))
- Performance concerns and extra overhead (2 comments): "seems like a lot of extra steps that probably degrade performance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48880610)) "ZeroFS performs horrifically." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48765938))
- Commercial licensing unclear or broken (2 comments): "significantly limiting the latter's ability to be easily adopted outside of open source projects" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46638080)) "the commercial license link https://www.zerofs.net/licensing is a 404 page" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49216692))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Amazon S3 Files](https://hackerapproved.com/p/s3-files.md): 9 recommend
- [s3fs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/s3fs.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "ZeroFS", https://hackerapproved.com/p/zerofs/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).