Nalden, who co-founded the file transfer service WeTransfer in 2009 along with Rinke Visser and Bas Beerens, is not pleased with the company’s direction after the service was acquired by Bending Spoon last year — and he doesn’t mince his words about it.
“Bending Spoons doesn’t really care about people, and even though I get that it is their private equity strategy, I notice that since I left [WeTransfer] in 2019, there were a lot of updates that were basically killing the product, in my point of view,” he told TechCrunch.
Post-acquisition, WeTransfer made a confusing move related to transfer link experiences and laid off 75% of its staff. This year, the company was caught in a controversy around using its users’ content to train AI models and had to backtrack on changes to its terms.
Around this time, Nalden had creatives reaching out to share their frustration with WeTransfer. He realized that he wanted to build an alternative to WeTransfer with the original ethos of the service around simplicity. The service is called Boomerang, and you can use it to transfer files without logging in.
“Why do tech companies always make things so complicated? I’ve always struggled with this, and I just wanted to offer another tool that is just, it’s all about user experience, it’s ease of use, it’s the simplicity of sharing something quickly, and that just saves time. You don’t need to sign up, you don’t need to verify via email,” Nalden told TechCrunch about the ethos of the service.
Image Credits: Boomerang
For casual users, the non-login experience would be sufficient, but it has its limits. You can have 1GB of total space, and upload files of up to 1GB in size with a seven-day expiration. If you want a bit more, you can choose to create a free account. That will get you 3GB of total space with a file upload limit of 3GB per file. You’ll asl get access to your upload history, the ability to add and delete …