A WeTransfer Alternative for Apps

WeTransfer was built for one job: a designer drags a 200MB folder onto a page, types a client's email, and the link dies in seven days. That is genuinely good for one-off handoffs. It is the wrong shape for a product. The moment your app needs to accept an upload, store it, and serve the same URL to a thousand users next quarter, the WeTransfer model — short-lived links, an email-centric flow, no first-class developer API — stops fitting. files.link is built for the permanent, programmatic case.

You upload through a three-call REST sequence (POST /v1/files/{folderId} to register the file and get a presigned PUT URL, PUT the bytes straight to storage, then POST /v1/files/confirm-upload with {ids:[...]}), and you get back a URL that stays live as long as your prepaid balance is funded. No 7-day timer, no 'this transfer has expired' page when a customer clicks an old link.

The two products diverge on three axes worth being honest about. First, expiry: WeTransfer expires by design; files.link links are permanent unless you set an expiry yourself. Second, integration: WeTransfer's strength is the no-signup drag-and-drop web flow, which files.link deliberately does not replicate — there is no anonymous one-off send here, every upload is authenticated with a raw API key.

Third, billing: WeTransfer sells seats and plan tiers; files.link is prepaid credits that debit daily against actual storage and delivery, so a quiet month costs almost nothing and a busy one never trips a seat limit. A typical migration: if you were emailing clients WeTransfer links from a backend cron, swap the WeTransfer step for the three-call upload, store the returned file id and URL in your database, and email that URL instead.

It will never expire on you. If you genuinely only need to hand a single video to one client today and never touch it again, keep WeTransfer or reach for transfer.sh — files.link is the better tool when the file is part of something you are building, not a disposable courier job. Files are served from a global CDN, so the same permanent link is fast whether the recipient is in Berlin or Singapore.

For a section-by-section breakdown of the two approaches, see files.link vs WeTransfer.