File Storage for Education

Educational content has two requirements that pull in opposite directions: it has to reach students everywhere with smooth playback, and a lot of it has to be restricted to people who paid or enrolled. files.link covers both without a separate video platform. Lecture recordings, slide decks, worksheets, problem sets, and reading PDFs all upload through one API and serve from an integrated global CDN, so a student streaming a lecture from a dorm on another continent gets edge-cached delivery and buffering that keeps up, not a stuttering pull from a single origin.

Access control is where most homegrown course setups fall down, and it is handled directly here. Free and preview material can use permanent CDN links, but anything behind a paywall — full modules, graded assignments, certificate-bearing courses — is stored as a private file and delivered through a time-limited signed URL that your LMS or course backend mints only after it confirms the student is enrolled.

The student clicks a link that works for them, now, and expires afterward; they cannot forward a permanent URL to a non-enrolled friend. That keeps the gate in your application logic, where it belongs, instead of relying on obscurity. The pricing model fits the seasonality of education: prepaid credits drawn against real storage and delivery mean a cohort-based course that spikes during a session and goes quiet between intakes costs what it actually uses, with no per-student or per-seat charge that penalizes a large enrollment.

Because every file type is treated the same, you keep a video lesson and its companion handout, code samples, and transcript in the same folder structure rather than splitting them across a video host and a file host. And the automation path is short: an instructor tool or your LMS can push new material with three calls — POST /v1/files/{folderId} for a presigned URL, a PUT of the file, then POST /v1/files/confirm-upload — so publishing next week's module is an API call, not a manual upload marathon.