Every freelancer I know has a version of this story.
You spend three weeks on a brand identity. Logo, typography, colour system, brand guide, icon set. You're proud of it. You zip everything up, upload it to WeTransfer, paste the link into an email, and send it to your client.
The link expires in seven days.
Your client doesn't open it for nine days.
They email you asking for the files again. You re-upload, send a new link. They open it, then email you with feedback: "Can you make the logo bigger?" and "Also I think the green is a bit dark." You make the changes, send another link.
Now there are three WeTransfer links in the email thread. Nobody knows which is the final one. Your client downloads the wrong version to the wrong folder and six months later calls you asking for "the original files."
This is the last mile of client delivery. It's a mess for almost every creative professional, and it's been a mess for years, and somehow no tool has fixed it properly.
What already existed
When we started working on 8fs, the tools in the space fell into three categories:
File transfer tools (WeTransfer, Smash, TransferNow): Good at moving bytes from A to B. Bad at everything that happens after: approvals, versioning, tracking, client context. Links expire. No annotation. No approval flow.
Video review tools (Frame.io, Dropbox Replay, Loom): Excellent for video specifically. Useless for the other 80% of what creatives deliver: logos, PDFs, design files, web builds, photos.
Client portal tools (HoneyBook, Dubsado, Bonsai): Full client relationship management: contracts, invoicing, questionnaires, the whole CRM stack. Genuinely useful, genuinely complex, genuinely expensive. Not what a designer who just needs to send five files and get an approval actually needs.
There was a gap in the middle: permanent branded delivery with client review and approval, at a price that makes sense for an individual or small team.
WeTransfer Portals was in that gap. It wasn't perfect but it was close: multi-file branded workspaces, client annotation, an approval button. A lot of creatives built their handoff workflow around it.
WeTransfer killed it in December 2025.
What we built and why
8fs is a tool for the last mile. Not project management. Not CRM. Not storage. Just the moment where you hand finished work to a client, they look at it, tell you what they think, and you close the project.
That moment has a few specific requirements:
The link should never expire. Your client doesn't work on your schedule. If they come back to download the final files six months later, the link should work.
The client shouldn't need an account. Creating an account to view a file you were sent is friction that doesn't serve anyone. Every account requirement is a percentage of clients who give up.
All the files for a project should live in one place. Separate links for logo, brand guide, and social kit is how you end up with three emails and a confused client. One portal URL, all the deliverables, organized by you.
The client should be able to approve or request changes per file. Not email. Not a comment in Notion. A button. Click Approve, the sender gets notified. Click Request changes, leave a note, the sender gets notified. Done. The approval is on record.
You should know when they opened it. "Did they get a chance to look?" is a question that should have an answer. Opened 4 times, not downloaded yet: that tells you something.
These aren't ambitious requirements. WeTransfer Portals had most of them. The problem is nobody offers them all at a price that makes sense for a solo creative.
The stack decision
We run on Cloudflare: Workers, D1 (SQLite at the edge), R2 for file storage. The economics of this stack are unusual: R2 has no egress fees, which means we don't pay more when your clients download files. Workers run at the edge globally, which means delivery pages load fast regardless of where your client is.
This matters for pricing. The reason most delivery tools are expensive isn't software complexity: it's infrastructure cost. AWS egress fees on a file delivery product add up fast. On R2, they don't. That's the structural reason we can charge $12/month while Dash charges £79.
The current state
8fs has been live for a few months. Portals shipped last week: the feature we built specifically to replace what WeTransfer killed.
Right now the product handles:
- Portals: Permanent branded URLs with multiple files, client approval per file, pinned image annotations, timestamped video comments. No client login.
- File delivery: Individual permanent delivery pages with view tracking, password protection, download limits, version history.
- Short links: URL shortener with click tracking.
- Secure notes: End-to-end encrypted one-time notes for sending passwords and sensitive info.
- Projects: Internal organization for your files, links, and notes. Wiki and todos per project.
The Mac menubar app: screenshot and screen recording that drops directly into a portal: is in development. That's the part that makes the workflow feel seamless: record a walkthrough, it's automatically in the client's portal, you didn't open a browser tab.
What I want feedback on
The positioning is "WeTransfer Portals replacement for freelancers and small agencies." But I'm curious whether that's too narrow: whether people who never used WeTransfer Portals understand why they need it.
The alternative positioning is "the client approval layer": broader, not tied to a competitor, describes the problem more directly. But it's also vaguer.
If you're a designer, photographer, video editor, or agency: I'd genuinely like to know: what does your current client handoff look like? What's the worst part of it? Does 8fs solve the thing you actually care about, or does it solve a problem you don't have?
Try the free plan here: no card. The portal feature is live, and I want to know if it does what you need it to do.
8fs is built by the team behind Retable, a spreadsheet/database tool with 4,000+ paying customers. We've been building software products for a while. This is the one we built because we needed it ourselves.