About Filesq
Filesq is a small toolkit for sharing files without ads or tracking. Upload a file, get a short link with a clean preview page, and move on.
What Filesq Is
Filesq turns a file into a link you can send to anyone. Drop a file in and you get back a short URL with a preview page built for that file type: an image viewer for photos, an inline player for audio and video, a page-by-page reader for PDFs, a plain text view for subtitles and code, and a clean download card for everything else. The recipient needs no account, sees no interstitial, and never has to solve a captcha before downloading.
The free tier is meant to be usable rather than demonstrative: 3 links a day, 20 MB per file, 500 views per link, kept for 3 days. Those numbers are printed on the upload page before you start, and the preview page shows the exact expiry date and time instead of a vague “expires soon”.
Why We Built It
Existing file-sharing tools force a sign-up, bury the download button under three ad slots, or expire links silently so you find out from the person who tried to open one. Meanwhile the honest option — email attachments — caps out around 25 MB and compresses your photos without asking.
We wanted the tool we kept wishing existed: state the limits before the upload, keep them, and serve a preview page that loads fast and contains nothing but your file. That is the entire product thesis, and it has not changed since the first version.
How It Works, End to End
- Upload. Drag a file onto the homepage or pick one from disk. The transfer runs straight from your browser with a progress bar; you sign in once — email code, Google or GitHub — and never per file.
- You get two URLs. A short public link for recipients, and a private manage link (signed with a 32-character owner token that lives only in your browser) for statistics and deletion.
- Recipients preview. The public link opens a lightweight page with the right viewer for that file type, plus a download button that returns the original file untouched.
- It expires on schedule. The expiry timestamp is set at upload time and shown to everyone. When it passes, the file is deleted from disk and the link returns a clear “expired” page rather than a broken error.
Two implementation details we are happy to spell out, because they are the ones that matter for privacy: public slugs are random 8-character tokens (not derived from your filename), and view counting uses a 24-hour cookie per link to de-duplicate refreshes — we do not build a download log keyed to IP addresses.
Free and Pro, Side by Side
| What you get | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Links per day | 3 | Unlimited |
| Maximum file size | 20 MB | 2 GB |
| Retention | 3 days | Never expires |
| Views per link | 500 | Unlimited |
| Preview pages, QR codes, view stats | Included | Included |
| Password-protected links | — | Included |
| Custom expiry and view limits | — | Included |
| Download speed throttling | None | None |
| Price | $0 | $29 one-time |
Full breakdown on the pricing page. Pro is a one-time purchase, not a subscription — there is nothing to cancel and no renewal date.
What We Do Not Do
- No account wall for your recipients. Uploading needs a free account; previewing and downloading never does.
- No ads on the pages that matter. Display advertising, when we run it, appears on guide pages only — never on an upload result, a preview page or a download.
- No re-encoding. We never alter, transcode, watermark or downscale your file.
- No silent deletion. Expiry is published at upload time and repeated on the preview page.
- No selling data. No data brokers, no audience segments, no “trusted partners”.
- No IP-keyed tracking. Views are de-duplicated with a per-link cookie, not a profile of you.
- No dark patterns. No countdowns, no fake scarcity, no pre-ticked upsells, no “your file will be deleted unless…”.
How the Toolkit Pays for Itself
Filesq is self-funded. Revenue comes from two places: the one-time Pro purchase, and display advertising on the guide and how-to pages — the ones you land on from search, never the ones where you are trying to get a file to someone. There is no outside investment, which is deliberate: it means no growth target that forces us to monetise the upload flow itself.
We also do not take money for placement. Nothing on Filesq or photo2kb can be bought into a recommendation, and no page carries a sponsored verdict.
The Rest of the Toolkit
Filesq is one of two single-purpose tools built and run by the same small team. Each one exists because the existing options were either bloated or dishonest:
They share the same operator, the same privacy defaults and the same rule about stating limits up front. If you like how Filesq behaves, the other one behaves the same way.
How We Handle Your Data
Uploaded files are stored on our own disks and encrypted at rest by the operating system. Access to the storage layer is restricted to the service process itself. Files are deleted on their expiry timestamp; links never touched are deleted on the same schedule.
Account data is limited to your email address and, if you sign in with GitHub or Google, the identifier those providers return. We do not use advertising cookies or third-party analytics scripts on preview pages. Details are in the privacy policy, the data processing addendum and the cookie notice; security researchers can reach us via security.txt.
What We Are Working On
Shipped recently: inline previews for five file types, QR codes for every link, per-day view statistics, the manage-link flow, and the one-time Pro tier.
Next up: bulk upload with a single share link, custom slugs, and a signed upload API for scripted workflows.
Exploring: expiring links with a fixed open count, and a self-hostable build for teams that cannot send files to anyone else’s server.
We publish what has actually shipped. Nothing above is a commitment or a date — if we build it, it shows up in the first list.
Who Runs This
Filesq is built and run by an independent team of engineers who ship small, single-purpose web apps and keep them running. We use every tool in the toolkit ourselves, on the same free tier you do, which is the fastest way to notice when a limit is wrong. If a number on this site disagrees with the product, the product is right and we fix the page.
Contact
- General questions, feedback and bug reports: [email protected]
- Abuse and takedown reports (answered within 24 hours): [email protected]
- Privacy requests and data deletion: [email protected]
- Billing and refunds: [email protected]
FAQ
Is Filesq really free, or is this a trial?
Really free, and not a countdown. The free tier gives you 3 links a day, 20 MB per file, 500 views per link and 3 days of retention. There is no trial clock, no card required to start, and no feature that quietly disappears after a week. Pro exists for people who need longer retention and bigger files — not to unlock something we already gave you.
Do I need an account to upload a file?
Yes, to upload — signing up is free and takes 30 seconds (email code, Google or GitHub). It keeps anonymous abuse off the servers and gives you a dashboard of your links. Anyone you send a link to never needs an account: preview and download are open to anyone holding the URL.
Can you see the files I upload?
Your files sit on our servers until they expire, so in a strict technical sense they are readable by the operator — we will not pretend otherwise. What we commit to is this: we do not open, scan, index, analyse or share the contents, we do not use them to train anything, and every file is deleted on its expiry timestamp or the moment you press delete.
What happens to my file when it expires?
It is deleted from disk on the expiry timestamp shown on the preview page. Deletion is permanent — there is no recycle bin and no restore window. If you need a link to outlive the free 3 days, Pro links never expire.
How long do links stay online if nobody opens them?
Retention is counted from the upload time, not from the last view. A free link lives 3 days whether it gets 0 views or 500. The preview page always prints the exact expiry date and time, so you never have to guess.
Can people find my links in Google?
No. Preview and download pages are served from a separate domain that is excluded from search engines with a noindex directive and a robots.txt disallow. Only someone holding the link can open it, and the slug is an unguessable random token rather than a filename.
Do you re-compress or convert my file?
Never. What you upload is what the recipient downloads, byte for byte, with the original filename and MIME type. There is no hidden transcoding, no watermark and no downscaling. Images, audio and video are displayed through a preview layer; the download button always returns the original.
Is there a file size or traffic limit I should worry about?
Free files cap at 20 MB each and 500 views per link. If you hit a view limit the link stops serving — you are told on the manage page before that happens. Pro raises the cap to 1 GB and removes both limits. We do not throttle download speed on either tier.
Last reviewed · Filesq is part of the Filesq toolkit.