Amazon S3 Alternative

Amazon S3 is the default for a reason — it is durable, scalable, and battle-tested. But the day-one developer experience is heavy. To upload one file you create a bucket, write a bucket policy, mint an IAM user or role with least-privilege actions, pull in the AWS SDK, configure the region, and then layer CloudFront in front if you want fast public delivery — a separate distribution, origin access control, and cache behaviors of its own.

Then the bill arrives with three meters most people underestimate: storage per GB, requests per thousand (PUT, GET, LIST all priced differently), and the one that hurts, data transfer out, billed per GB egressed to the internet. files.link collapses that into a managed service. There is no IAM, no bucket policy, no SDK, and no separate CDN to wire up — public files are delivered over a global CDN as part of the product, and there is no separate egress meter to forecast.

Uploading is three HTTP calls with your raw API key in the Authorization header: POST /v1/files/{folderId} returns { success, urls:[{ url, id }] }; PUT the bytes to that presigned url; POST /v1/files/confirm-upload with { ids:[id] }. That is the whole integration, in any language that can make an HTTP request, with nothing to install. Migrating off S3 is mechanical: list your objects (aws s3 ls or ListObjectsV2), download each one, run it through the three-call upload, and store the new permanent URL alongside the old S3 key in your database; once every record points at a files.link URL, flip your reads and turn the bucket off.

Where S3 still wins is when you genuinely need the S3 ecosystem — Athena querying data in place, Lambda S3 triggers, cross-region replication, or strict S3-protocol compatibility for an existing tool. files.link is not S3-API-compatible and doesn't try to be; it is the simpler choice when what you actually want is to store a file and serve it fast without becoming a part-time AWS administrator.

Pricing is prepaid credits, so you draw down a balance you set instead of reconciling three usage meters and a transfer bill after the fact.