Why WeTransfer co-founder is building another file transfer service

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 files anytime, and the ability to customize emojis on the page while sending the file.

If you want even more, there is a €6.99 per month paid tier, which will give you 200GB per space (folders) and 500GB total storage with a file upload limit of 5GB per file. Plus, you’ll get custom covers for spaces, password protection for files, up to 90 days of expiry, and the ability to invite unlimited users to access files in a space.

Image Credits: boomerang

Nalden is clear that with this new service, he doesn’t want to offer advertising to users and keep a simple structure for payment. He feels that there is a lot of complexity in the advertising business, and with Boomerang, he wants to get the least amount of data he can from users.

“I just want to offer a tool that works for users. It’s like buying a hammer. You possibly don’t want to buy a fancy hammer, but a hammer that just works,” he noted.

Boomerang’s site and interface are barebones, and that is by design. Nalden noted that a lot of design is to please investors, and he feels that stripping down the experience is a refreshing change. While companies are looking to add more and more AI features, Nalden said that he is largely using AI to build the product, but he doesn’t want to use it around user-facing features.

Boomerang is available on the web, but the company said it is planning to release a dedicated Mac app soon.