Azure Blob Storage Alternative

Azure Blob Storage is powerful, but its power is the problem when all you want is to store and serve some files. Before a single byte lands you're creating a subscription, a resource group, a storage account (with its own globally-unique name and replication choice), a container, then wiring up access — either account keys, SAS tokens, or Azure AD RBAC role assignments.

Add access-tier management (Hot/Cool/Cold/Archive), and you've spent an afternoon on plumbing. files.link collapses that to: sign up, create a project, upload. There's no cloud platform to adopt, no resource hierarchy to design, and no RBAC graph to reason about — a single API key authenticates the REST calls, passed as the raw Authorization header (no Bearer prefix).

Uploading is three steps: POST /v1/files/{folderId} returns a presigned URL, you PUT the bytes to it, then POST /v1/files/confirm-upload with the file id. Delivery is built in via a global CDN across 450+ edge locations, where Azure would have you provision Azure CDN or Front Door and bind it to the storage account as a separate resource. On tiers, we're deliberately simpler: a standard tier and a cold storage tier, versus Azure's four — which covers the typical developer case (user uploads, static assets, documents, backups) without tier-lifecycle rules to author.

The honest limits: if your organization standardizes on Azure for compliance boundaries, VNet service endpoints, or fine-grained RBAC tied to Entra ID, Blob Storage gives you governance files.link doesn't try to replicate. files.link is for the team that adopted Azure Blob only because they needed a place to put files, and now spends more time in the portal than in their app.

Files are private by default with signed URLs, encrypted at rest, and billed with prepaid credits so there's no metered-egress surprise on the monthly invoice. Also see our no-AWS hosting and DigitalOcean Spaces comparisons.