DigitalOcean Spaces Alternative

DigitalOcean Spaces is a tidy product: S3-compatible object storage with a bundled CDN and a base subscription of $5/month that includes 250 GB of storage and 1 TB of transfer. That floor is fine if you're already saturating it, but it's the wrong shape for a side project, a staging environment, or a microservice that stores a few hundred megabytes — you pay $5 every month whether you store one file or 250 GB, and you pay it per Spaces subscription. files.link bills the opposite way: prepaid credits with no monthly minimum, so a tiny workload costs tiny money and a quiet month costs almost nothing.

The CDN comes built in across 450+ edge locations, the same as Spaces' bundled CDN, but the organizational model is richer — instead of Spaces' flat bucket, you get projects and folders to separate environments, clients, or services, plus permanent shareable links rather than raw object keys. The $5 floor also stacks: each additional Space you spin up to isolate a client or a staging environment is another monthly subscription, so a handful of small buckets quietly multiply into a real bill, whereas every project and folder on files.link draws from the same prepaid balance.

And because Spaces meters transfer above the bundled 1 TB, a single asset that goes viral can push you into per-GB overage on top of the base fee — the prepaid model has no such cliff. The honest trade is the API surface: Spaces speaks S3, so existing s3cmd/rclone/SDK tooling works unchanged. files.link uses its own REST API — POST /v1/files/{folderId} to get a presigned URL, PUT the file, POST /v1/files/confirm-upload to finalize, authenticating with the raw API key as the Authorization header.

Migrating a small Spaces bucket is straightforward: list objects, download them, and re-upload through the three-call flow, then swap your app's object-key references for the permanent files.link URLs. For developers who picked Spaces because it was simpler than raw AWS but still find themselves paying a fixed monthly fee for storage they barely touch, the pay-as-you-go model removes the floor entirely while keeping the convenience of an integrated CDN.

Also weigh us against Vultr Object Storage and Wasabi.