Developer-first Video Storage

Encoding services charge you per minute to transcode, but they are a terrible place to keep the thing you actually need to protect: the master. files.link is at-rest storage for source video — the ProRes or DNxHD edit master, the camera-original MP4 and MOV files, the multi-gigabyte MKV screencast, the project exports you might re-cut a year from now. It stores the original container and codec untouched, because a master archive that silently re-encodes your footage is not a master archive.

Uploads use the standard three-step REST flow. POST /v1/files/{folderId} returns { success, urls:[{url,id,...}] }; you then PUT the raw bytes of each clip directly to its presigned url, so a 40GB ProRes file streams straight into storage instead of being proxied; finally POST /v1/files/confirm-upload with { ids:[...] }. The header is just your raw API key. Because the PUT goes direct, ingesting nightly renders from a CI step or a render farm is just a curl in a loop, and a dropped connection only affects one file rather than the whole batch.

For footage you rarely touch — finished projects, raw dailies you keep for legal or re-edit reasons — move it to the cold storage tier and pay a fraction of the standard rate, accepting a brief retrieval step and a 90-day minimum retention before download. Keep work-in-progress masters on standard storage where they download instantly. Private masters live as private files behind expiring signed URLs you generate server-side; nothing is public unless you choose it.

This page is about the bytes at rest, not playback. If you need viewers to actually watch these files in a browser, the video-streaming and video-cdn pages cover delivery; finished broadcasts and exported VOD masters belong on live stream archive storage while general video masters stay here; video-subtitle-storage covers the sidecar caption files.

Billing is prepaid credits against storage and bandwidth, so a deep library that is written once and read rarely costs little — and there is no encoding meter, because files.link never encodes.