Developer-first Chat Media Storage

Every messaging product hits the same wall: the first thousand users send text, the next hundred thousand send photos, voice notes, screen recordings, and the occasional 80 MB video, and suddenly your media tier is the most expensive and most fragile part of the stack. A chat platform's media has a brutal access pattern — a meme posted in a busy channel might be fetched ten thousand times in an hour and then never again, while a one-to-one DM attachment is read twice in its lifetime. files.link is built for exactly this shape: public media is served from a global CDN so the hot meme is cached at the edge near every viewer, while cold DM attachments simply sit in storage costing almost nothing to keep.

The upload path fits the realtime loop cleanly. When a user sends media, your backend (or your Discord/Telegram/Slack bot) takes the bytes, calls POST /v1/files/{folderId}, PUTs to the presigned URL, and confirms with POST /v1/files/confirm-upload — then broadcasts the returned CDN link over your websocket so it renders inline the instant the message lands. There is no SDK to bundle into a mobile client and no signed-upload dance to reverse-engineer; the three HTTP calls work the same from a Node gateway, a Go service, or a Cloudflare Worker sitting in front of your chat fleet.

Access control matters more in chat than almost anywhere else. Private channels and DMs should serve media as private files, where your server mints a signed URL per fetch and only for participants it has already authorized — a leaked link expires in minutes rather than exposing a conversation forever. Public servers and open communities can use permanent public links so the CDN does the heavy lifting.

Voice notes, stickers, GIFs, documents, and video all upload the same way with no format gatekeeping. Because links are permanent, message history stays intact: scroll back two years and the images still load. And prepaid credits mean a viral channel spikes your bandwidth, not a surprise invoice that arrives three weeks later.