Ask HN: Do you think there's a need for simple file sharing service?

1 point·Fsp2WFuH··7 comments

Thinking of making a simple site for sharing files. As easy as imgur, you drag-drop, upload, and get a link you can share. But with a twist - you can only download once, preventing most DMCA takedowns and illegal activities (movie sharing).

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That limits the transfer to 1:1. Unless it is linked to from a popular site, I think you might find not many people will use it.

I created a couple of sites that let people upload any large file, all server side code, no javascript and people rarely use it. I've also created public anonymous sftp servers, but people don't use them. "too difficult".

Nowadays folks mostly use discord for chat and small images and box for bigger files because of the integration with their desktop and other clients.

https://www.justbeamit.com/ That's pretty much what you described

https://send.firefox.com is another one.

What would the use case be?

How would you monetize?

You want to send a file to a friend, maybe a word file, maybe a movie. So probably up to 4GB in size. Something that could be too big for email, or too large for imgur to not compress it (images).

I'd advertise my other products, so it would be a loss leader for me.

I'd probably make people register.

Such a simple service does not require registration. Assuming you're mentioning this for reasons of logs/security/liability reasons, I'd probably just throttle. Maybe auto delete after 1hr after upload complete and no download attempts made, so server is always clean.

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