Developer-first User-Generated Content Storage

The moment your product lets users upload — profile photos, post attachments, submitted documents, marketplace listings — you inherit a hard storage problem: unpredictable volume, untrusted files, and a strict requirement that one user can never reach another user's data. files.link is built to absorb that. It stores end-user uploads coming from your platform with direct-to-storage ingestion, per-user access isolation, and CDN delivery, so the storage layer scales while your app code stays small.

The upload pattern keeps raw bytes off your servers entirely. Your backend calls POST /v1/files/{folderId} and gets back { success, urls:[{url,id,...}] }; you hand the presigned url to the client (or upload server-side), the bytes go straight to storage via PUT, and you finalize with POST /v1/files/confirm-upload sending { ids:[...] }. The Authorization header is your raw API key.

Because the heavy upload bypasses your application, a sudden flood of uploads doesn't saturate your web tier — your servers only broker short presigned URLs and confirmations.

Isolation is the part that matters most for UGC. Organize per user or per tenant with folders, and use separate projects (each with its own API key) for hard multi-tenant boundaries. Keep uploads private by default — they're untrusted and often personal — and serve them only through signed URLs your backend mints for the authorized viewer, each expiring after a short window.

That way a leaked or scraped URL stops working, and a user can never enumerate someone else's files. Pre-moderation content stays private until you approve it; approved public content can flip to a permanent CDN link.

Billing is prepaid credits with no per-upload fee, which is the right shape for UGC: a viral moment costs you storage and bandwidth, not a per-object surcharge that punishes success. For the broader how-to, see how-to-store-user-uploads; for media-specific intake, image-upload-api, image-storage, and chat-media-storage; for framework integration, react-file-storage and nodejs-file-storage; and for billing-gated uploads, stripe-file-uploads. serverless-file-storage and cloud-file-storage-api cover backend patterns.