WeTransfer Portals is gone. Here's what actually happened: and where to go.

WeTransfer gave users three weeks of notice.

On October 22, 2025, you could no longer create new Portals or Reviews. On November 22, existing ones were frozen: no new uploads, no new comments, no new approvals. On December 22, everything was deleted. Every portal, every annotation, every approval record your clients had left: permanently erased.

No export. No migration path. Gone.

If you were a designer, photographer, video editor, or agency using WeTransfer Portals to manage client feedback and approvals, you lost a workflow that took years to build. And you got three weeks to replace it.

What WeTransfer Portals actually was

Before we talk alternatives, it's worth being precise about what was lost: because most "alternatives" articles confuse WeTransfer's file transfer product with WeTransfer Portals, and they're completely different things.

WeTransfer transfer (the free product everyone knows): Upload a file, send an expiring link, recipient downloads it. This still exists. This isn't what was killed.

WeTransfer Portals: A persistent branded workspace where you could group multiple deliverables for a client project under one URL. Logo files, brand guide, video renders, social kit: all in one place, all accessible from one link that never expired.

WeTransfer Reviews: Built on top of Portals. Clients could open each file inline, click anywhere on an image to drop a pinned comment, leave timestamped notes on video, and click an explicit "Approve" or "Request changes" button. No client account required. No email thread. One click.

The combination: Portals + Reviews: was used heavily by:

• Graphic designers delivering brand identity packages
• Video editors sharing rough cuts for client sign-off
• Photographers delivering final selects for approval
• Web agencies handing off finished builds
• Teachers and education teams sharing work for review

If you were using this, you know exactly how clean it was. If you weren't, it was essentially a lightweight version of what Frame.io does for video: but for any file type, with no per-seat pricing, and with zero friction for clients.

Why it was killed

WeTransfer was acquired by Bending Spoons in July 2024. Bending Spoons is an Italian holding company with a clear playbook: acquire consumer apps with large user bases, cut 70–75% of staff, strip back features to reduce operational complexity, and increase monetization of the remaining user base.

They've run the same playbook on Evernote, Filmic Pro, and now Vimeo (acquired September 2025).

WeTransfer's official reason for killing Portals and Reviews: "very few users relied on them." Whether or not that's accurate, the business logic is obvious: Portals and Reviews required backend infrastructure, storage, and engineering support. For a company in cost-cutting mode ahead of an IPO (Bending Spoons filed for a $20B Nasdaq IPO in June 2026), every feature that isn't the core transfer product is a liability.

In July 2025, WeTransfer had already burned trust by quietly updating their terms of service to allow AI training on uploaded files. They reversed it after a week of backlash: designers and photographers were furious about their clients' IP being used to train models. The trust damage stuck. And then, four months later, came the Portals announcement.

The alternatives you'll find: and what they're missing

When Portals shut down, a lot of "10 alternatives to WeTransfer Portals" articles appeared. Most of them recommend the same tools:

Frame.io: The best product for video review. But it requires Adobe Creative Cloud (starts at $54.99/month), charges per seat for teams, and doesn't handle non-video files well. If you're a video editor who's already paying for Adobe CC, it's a solid option. For everyone else, it's overkill at 5x the price.

Dash: A genuinely good product: visual content management, approval workflows, client portals: but it starts at £79/month and is designed for marketing teams managing large brand asset libraries. A solo designer or 2-person studio doesn't need a full DAM. They need to send their client a link and get an approval.

Hightail: Older product, has review features, but the UX is dated and pricing is opaque.

Dropbox Replay: Video review only. Same problem as Frame.io: great for one file type, useless for the rest.

Notion / Google Drive: Not review tools. Clients end up emailing feedback anyway.

Boomerang.zip: Launched December 2025 by the WeTransfer co-founder after the backlash. Clean, minimal, trustworthy: but it's a transfer tool, not a portal. No persistent delivery, no approval flow, no client annotation. It replaces WeTransfer's file transfer product, not Portals.

The gap in every list: there is no tool that does what WeTransfer Portals + Reviews did, at indie/freelancer pricing, for any file type. That combination simply doesn't exist: except for what we built.

What 8fs does

8fs started as a file delivery tool: permanent branded links, view tracking, file versioning. The kind of thing WeTransfer's paid plan approximated but never quite nailed.

After WeTransfer killed Portals, we built the replacement.

Portals on 8fs work like this:

1. You create a portal with a permanent URL: 8fs.io/p/spring-campaign
2. You add files from your uploads: logo suite, brand guide, social kit, video render, whatever
3. You share one link with your client
4. Your client opens a branded page: your logo, your org name: and sees all your deliverables
5. They can view images inline (and click to pin comments), leave timestamped notes on video, and click Approve or Request changes per file
6. You get an email notification for each action
7. No client account. No app install. Works on any device.

The portal link never expires. You can update files inside it: the URL stays the same. If you swap the logo from v2 to v3, your client's bookmark still works.

Price: $12/month. Not per seat. Not per client. Not per portal. Flat.

That's the whole pitch. WeTransfer Portals did this. WeTransfer killed it. We rebuilt it at a price that makes sense for a solo creative or small agency.

Who it's for

If you're a designer, photographer, video editor, motion designer, or web agency: and you regularly deliver finished work to clients and need sign-off before the project closes: 8fs is built for you.

It's not for enterprise. It's not for teams with IT departments. It's for one person or a small team that needs a professional client delivery workflow without the enterprise pricing.

The free plan lets you try it with 5 delivery links and 1 GB of storage. No credit card. The Pro plan is $12/month and includes unlimited portals, unlimited delivery links, 100 GB storage, and no 8fs branding on your delivery pages.

The honest comparison

If you lost your workflow when WeTransfer deleted Portals, 8fs is free to try. No card required.