api.video Alternative

api.video is a full video platform: you upload a source file and it transcodes into adaptive bitrate renditions, gives you a hosted player, HLS streaming, live streaming, thumbnails, and analytics. Encoding is free; you pay for storage at roughly $0.00285 per minute stored and delivery at about $0.0017 per delivered minute, where a delivery minute is duration actually watched (a 10-minute video watched fully by 500 viewers is 5,000 delivery minutes).

There is a watermarked 30-second sandbox, then pay-as-you-go. If you are building a streaming or course experience that needs adaptive playback, a player, and engagement analytics, that is exactly what api.video is for, and files.link is not a substitute for it. The angle here is narrower: a lot of products do not need a VOD platform — they need to store an MP4 and let someone download or progressively play it.

Marketing clips, user-recorded videos kept as-is, product demos, screen recordings, generated renders, internal training files. For that, an encoding-and-streaming platform priced on watched minutes is more machine than the job requires. files.link stores the video file you upload and serves it over a global CDN with HTTP range requests, so browsers can seek and progressively play an MP4 without any adaptive-streaming setup.

Upload is three HTTP calls with your raw API key in the Authorization header: POST /v1/files/{folderId} returns a presigned URL, PUT the bytes (large files stream straight to storage, not through your server), POST /v1/files/confirm-upload returns a permanent CDN URL. Public videos get a permanent edge-served URL; private ones use signed URLs with a 10-minute expiry.

Be clear on the trade: files.link does not transcode, does not produce HLS/DASH ladders, ships no player, and has no view analytics. It serves the original container as uploaded — so you would encode to a web-friendly MP4 (H.264/AAC) yourself if your source is not already one, and embed it in a standard video tag. Where api.video clearly wins: adaptive bitrate for flaky networks, live streaming, the built-in player, and analytics.

Where files.link wins back: no per-watched-minute meter, predictable prepaid credits covering storage and delivery, a cold storage tier for masters and archives, and a dead-simple upload-and-link flow when host this video file is the entire requirement.