Filecoin Alternative

Filecoin is a blockchain-based storage marketplace: you make storage deals with miners, pay in FIL, and your data is proved on-chain over time. It is designed for verifiable, long-horizon archival, and it pairs with IPFS for content addressing. None of that is how a normal web app wants to store a profile photo or a downloadable PDF. Retrieval on Filecoin is not instantaneous — files often need an IPFS pinning service or a retrieval deal to be served quickly — and the whole stack assumes you are comfortable with wallets, CIDs, deal-making, and gas. files.link throws all of that away.

It is a plain storage service with an integrated global CDN: you upload over HTTP and the file is immediately retrievable from a nearby edge, no content-addressing or pinning layer in between. There are no tokens to acquire and no on-chain transactions; you pay with ordinary prepaid credits. The API is three calls authenticated by a raw API key in the Authorization header: POST /v1/files/{folderId} returns { success, urls:[{ url, id }] }, you PUT the bytes to the presigned url, and you finalize with POST /v1/files/confirm-upload sending { ids:[...] }.

If you currently store data on Filecoin via a gateway or a service like web3.storage, migration means fetching each object by its CID over an IPFS HTTP gateway, then replaying it through that three-call flow — a straightforward script, with the bonus that your new URLs are stable HTTPS links rather than CIDs your users have to resolve. The honest boundary: files.link is not decentralized and makes no cryptographic-proof-of-storage claim, so if your requirement is trustless, censorship-resistant, on-chain-verifiable archival, Filecoin remains the right tool.

But if you mistook Filecoin for cheap cloud storage and discovered the deal/retrieval complexity the hard way, a conventional REST service with a CDN, permanent links, and signed URLs for private files is the pragmatic landing spot. For long-tail data you rarely touch, files.link also offers a cold storage tier so you can keep archival costs down without leaving the same simple API.