The game isn’t won on gigabytes. It’s won on days.

The big number on the box is the wrong one

Maximum size is the metric file transfer is sold on, because it is instant and impressive. It is also the metric that matters least: “this file doesn’t fit” is a problem you solve once; “this link has expired” is a problem that comes back every week.

WeTransfer, SwissTransfer and Smash are all priced on the same idea: a transfer is an event with a date of death. Three days, seven, fifteen, thirty. After that the recipient sees an empty page, and the sender has to do it all again — re-upload, rewrite the email, re-explain.

Inside a company a file is not an event. It is a document someone will ask you for in two months, when the link is long gone.

How long a transfer really lasts

Figures taken from the three vendors’ public pricing pages and help centres, August 2026. Terms change often: always check the official page before deciding.

The real difference: the link expires, the file doesn’t

This is where the two models genuinely diverge. On the other three services expiry is a deletion: when the counter hits zero the file is removed from their systems and there is nothing left to reactivate. On Express expiry is a revocation of access: the link stops working, but the object stays in your R2 bucket, with its name, its folder and its download history.

The practical consequence is mundane and changes your day: when a client writes “my link expired”, you don’t re-upload 800 MB. You open the panel and regenerate the link on the same file, with a new validity and a new token. The old address stays dead, the new one goes out in two clicks.

• Validity you choose: 3 to 90 days on every send, 7 days by default.
• Regeneration: an expired send is revived without touching the file, and the system keeps count of regenerations.
• Explicit deletion: a file leaves the bucket only when an administrator decides to remove it.
• No third-party archive cap: the space is your own Cloudflare storage, paid at real usage.

Smash, too, is ultimately paid per user

Smash is the most generous of the three on size and it is cheap: a very good product for a single professional. But the structure is the usual one — the Pro plan is a single account, and to let more people send you move to the Team plan, bought in seat brackets. A little at a time, but per head — and heads grow with headcount, not with usage.

And the countdown is still there on top: thirty days and the transfer is gone, on the paid plan as much as on the free one. You pay a recurring subscription for a service that, by design, keeps nothing.

The same logic applies to WeTransfer, with one extra layer of friction: the base tiers give you a three-day window, and “unlimited” expiry is the commercial hook that walks you up to the higher plan. We dig into that in our piece on per-user licensing costs.

A repository with folders, not a pile of transfers

There is a second effect of expiry that you only notice after a few months: consumer services have no structure. They have a history. Transfers stack up by date, you search by recipient name or guess — and since everything vanishes after thirty days anyway, the problem of organising them “solves itself”.

Express is built the other way round. Every file lives in a folder, like on a file server: Clients/Rossi/2026, Tenders/City of Milan, Marketing/Trade shows. The panel has a folder browser with search and on-the-fly creation, and recipient autocomplete is shared across the team, so whoever sends finds the right contact straight away.

• You find a document by where it lives, not by when you sent it.
• The same file serves several sends, to different people, at different times.
• The archive stays readable to people who didn’t make the original send.
• Structure outlives people: when a colleague leaves, the files stay put.

Pricing and structure side by side

Express’s model is deliberately flat: one licence, €499 a year for the whole company, plus the Cloudflare costs of your instance, paid upfront and then drawn down at cost. No tiers, no free plan whose only job is to get you into the funnel. The detail is on the pricing page.

Where Express does not win

Worth saying out loud, because an honest comparison is more useful than one won on paper.

• We are not first on single-transfer size. Express goes up to 25 GB per file and 15 GB for a multi-file ZIP send; SwissTransfer reaches 50 GB, and the top tiers of Smash and WeTransfer go further. If your use case is shipping a 300 GB video master, that is their ground.
• There is no free plan. For an occasional send with no requirements, SwissTransfer is free and does the job perfectly well.
• It needs initial setup. A dedicated instance with your domain and branding doesn’t spin up with a credit card in thirty seconds: there is an onboarding.

How to choose

If you send a file now and then, personally, take the free one and stop thinking about it. If you send often but you are one person, a consumer subscription is cheap and convenient.

If instead sending files is a business process — several people sending, documents that must stay traceable, clients who ask for a file months later, a brand you want visible on the download page too — then the question is not how many gigabytes fit in one send. It is who decides when that file stops existing.

Go deeper: WeTransfer alternative, data control and branded downloads.