FilexHost vs Gaffa

Universal File Support & Smart Rendering

FilexHost supports an extensive range of file types including PDFs, images (JPG, PNG, HEIC), audio/video (MP4, MP3), data files (XLSX, CSV, JSON), archives (ZIP), and code. Its intelligent rendering engine automatically displays each file in its optimal format. HTML files become live websites, spreadsheets turn into interactive tables, and media files play with built-in lightweight players. This eliminates the need for recipients to have specific software, ensuring a consistent and professional viewing experience every time.

Instant Subdomains & Zero-Configuration Hosting

With FilexHost, getting a live, shareable link takes seconds. Upon upload, the platform instantly generates a unique, secure subdomain (e.g., your-file.filex.host) with zero setup required from the user. There is no command line, git, or complex configuration. Every link is automatically secured with free SSL encryption, providing a safe and trusted connection for all viewers. This feature democratizes web hosting, making it accessible to anyone regardless of technical expertise.

Granular Sharing Controls

Beyond simple links, FilexHost provides powerful controls over how your content is shared and accessed. You can set files to expire after a set duration (from 24 hours to forever), add optional password protection for privacy, and choose the view mode. You can present files with a direct, full-screen render or within a customizable download page that includes a title and description, giving you flexibility based on the context of the share.

Blazing Fast Global CDN

Every file uploaded to FilexHost is distributed via a global Content Delivery Network (CDN). This means your content is cached on servers around the world, ensuring low latency and fast loading times for your audience no matter where they are located. This performance is crucial for professional presentations, product demos, and user experiences, removing frustrating load times and keeping the focus squarely on your content.

Simple REST API for Automation

Gaffa abstracts the complexities of frameworks like Playwright, Selenium, and Puppeteer into a straightforward REST API. This means you can control real browsers at scale with a single API call, leaving behind the need to manage frameworks, configuration, and low-level browser drivers. It dramatically reduces the learning curve and development time, allowing you to implement powerful browser automation without deep expertise in specific testing or automation libraries.

Real Browser Interaction & JavaScript Rendering

Unlike basic HTTP clients, Gaffa uses real browsers by default, ensuring full JavaScript rendering and eliminating the quirks associated with headless browsers. This guarantees that your automations interact with web pages exactly as a human user would, which is critical for navigating modern, dynamic websites that rely heavily on client-side scripts for content loading and functionality.

Built-in Global Proxy Network

Gaffa seamlessly integrates with a network of residential proxies, managed for you. You simply specify your target geographic location, and Gaffa handles the rest, providing fast and reliable access from across the world. This removes the significant operational burden of sourcing, rotating, and maintaining your own proxy infrastructure to avoid IP blocks and geo-restrictions.

Advanced Data Processing & Observability

Gaffa goes beyond fetching raw HTML. It can process page data into simplified HTML, LLM-ready markdown, or even save a self-contained offline version. Furthermore, it offers full observability by recording your automation sessions. This allows you to easily replay and debug interactions, providing clear visibility into what happened during each request, which is invaluable for maintaining robust data pipelines.

Professional Client Reporting & Deliverables

Consultants, freelancers, and agencies can use FilexHost to deliver reports, presentations, and design mockups to clients. Instead of bulky email attachments or confusing cloud storage links that require "request access," professionals can upload a file, set a password for confidentiality, and share a clean, direct link. The smart rendering ensures PDFs and spreadsheets are viewed perfectly in-browser, creating a polished and frictionless client experience.

Developer Prototyping & Static Site Hosting

Developers and designers can rapidly prototype and share landing pages, project demos, or mock API endpoints. By simply dragging and dropping an HTML file or a ZIP archive of a static site, they get an instantly live URL to share with teammates, stakeholders, or for testing. This accelerates feedback cycles and simplifies the process of showcasing work-in-progress without deploying to a production server.

Digital Product Distribution

Creators, educators, and small businesses selling digital products like e-books, guides, software, or media bundles can use FilexHost for secure distribution. The Pro plan's large file support (up to 1GB), permanent hosting, and password protection allow for creating direct, ad-free download pages. This provides a professional, branded alternative to generic file transfer services for delivering purchased goods to customers.

Friction-Free Media & Portfolio Sharing

Photographers, musicians, and artists can create instant galleries and portfolios. Upload images, audio tracks, or video reels, and FilexHost will present them with built-in viewers and players. This allows creatives to share their work via a single link in presentations, on social media, or in emails, ensuring the recipient sees a beautifully formatted presentation without needing to download files or install plugins.

Competitive Intelligence and Market Research

Startups and enterprises can use Gaffa to automate the collection of pricing, product listings, and promotional data from competitor websites at scale. This provides a reliable, up-to-date stream of market intelligence to validate business strategies, track market movements, and inform critical decisions without manual, error-prone data gathering.

Building Data-Driven Products

Companies building products that rely on external web data—such as price comparison engines, lead generation platforms, or content aggregators—can use Gaffa as their core data ingestion engine. Its scalability and reliability ensure their product has a consistent and high-quality data feed, allowing the team to focus on product features and user experience instead of pipeline maintenance.

Automated Content Extraction and Archiving

Researchers, journalists, and compliance teams can leverage Gaffa to systematically scrape, archive, and convert web content into structured formats. Whether saving web pages as self-contained offline documents for legal records or converting articles into clean markdown for analysis by Large Language Models (LLMs), Gaffa automates and simplifies the entire process.

Automated Testing and Monitoring

Development and operations teams can utilize Gaffa to automate complex user journey tests on live production websites or monitor third-party service uptime and content changes. By executing real browser interactions, it can verify that critical user flows work correctly and alert teams to unexpected changes or outages on external sites they depend on.

FilexHost offers a straightforward two-tier pricing model designed to scale with user needs, from casual sharing to professional, high-traffic usage.

Free Plan: Perfect for quick sharing, testing, and prototyping. It includes hosting for up to 1,000 files, a maximum file size of 25MB, 1GB of total storage, and 10GB of monthly bandwidth. Links can have an expiry of up to 7 days. This plan includes ads and a watermark and does not include access to analytics.

Pro Plan: Built for business, SEO, and permanent hosting. Priced at $10 per month, it unlocks 10,000 hosted files, a 1GB maximum file size, 100GB of total storage, and 100GB of monthly bandwidth. Key features include forever file expiry (no automatic deletion), a completely ad-free and watermark-free experience, and access to views and downloads analytics. This plan also includes advanced sharing controls like password protection.

Gaffa offers tiered pricing plans to suit projects at every stage of growth, along with flexible pay-as-you-go options.

Starter Plan ($29/month): Ideal for small or personal projects. Includes 9,000 credits, 1 concurrent request, a 1-minute max runtime, 7-day data retention, and access to residential proxies.

Startup Plan ($99/month): Designed to power growing startups. Includes 35,000 credits, 3 concurrent requests, a 2-minute max runtime, 30-day data retention, and residential proxies.

Growth Plan ($249/month): Built for scaling operations. Includes 100,000 credits, 10 concurrent requests, a 5-minute max runtime, 3-month data retention, and residential proxies.

Get Credits (Pay-As-You-Go): For additional or standalone usage, credits can be purchased at $20 per 5,000 credits, with the same allowances as the Starter plan. For bespoke, high-volume needs, custom enterprise plans are available by contacting the Gaffa team.

FilexHost represents the next evolution in digital file sharing, transforming a traditionally complex process into a seamless, instantaneous experience. It is a universal hosting platform designed for professionals, creators, and developers who need to share files and static websites without the friction of traditional methods. The core value proposition is profound simplicity: a "Drop & Share" workflow that eliminates servers, DNS configurations, and mandatory logins for recipients. FilexHost intelligently renders over 100 file types, from documents and spreadsheets to full HTML projects, presenting them as beautiful, interactive experiences directly in the browser. This focus on the viewer's journey ensures your work is seen exactly as intended, whether it's a client report, a product demo, or a portfolio piece. The platform grows with your needs, starting with a robust free tier for testing and quick shares, and scaling to a Pro plan for permanent, high-traffic hosting with advanced controls. FilexHost is more than a tool; it's a streamlined pathway from your desktop to your audience, built for a world that moves at the speed of an idea.

Gaffa represents the next evolutionary step for developers and businesses that have outgrown the fragile, time-consuming nature of DIY web data extraction and browser automation. In the early stages of a project, managing proxies, headless browsers, and CAPTCHA-solving scripts might be a manageable hurdle. However, as your ambitions grow and you target more complex, anti-bot protected websites, these homemade systems become a major bottleneck, consuming valuable engineering resources that should be focused on core product development. Gaffa solves this by providing a sophisticated, production-ready REST API that abstracts away the entire infrastructure headache. It empowers teams to progress from simple data fetching to executing complex, human-like browser interactions at any scale, without the operational overhead. Whether you're a startup validating a market with competitive data or an enterprise building a data-driven product, Gaffa provides the reliable, scalable foundation to fuel your growth. It lets you concentrate entirely on deriving insights and value from web data, not on maintaining the fragile tools to collect it. By handling the complexities of real browsers, global proxies, scaling, and data processing, Gaffa is the engine that powers your data evolution.

What is FilexHost?

FilexHost is an instant file hosting and sharing platform designed to simplify how individuals and professionals distribute digital content. It allows you to upload virtually any file type and instantly receive a secure, shareable web link. The platform intelligently renders files for optimal in-browser viewing, turning documents into readable pages, spreadsheets into interactive tables, and HTML files into live websites, all without requiring technical setup from the uploader or the viewer.

Is it really free?

Yes, FilexHost offers a fully-featured free plan designed for testing, prototyping, and quick sharing. The free tier includes hosting for up to 1,000 files with a maximum size of 25MB each, 1GB of total storage, and links that can be set to expire after up to 7 days. This plan is supported by ads and includes a watermark. For permanent hosting, larger files, and advanced features like analytics and password protection, users can upgrade to the Pro plan.

What file types are supported?

FilexHost supports a wide array of file formats. This includes documents (PDF, TXT, RTF), data files (XLSX, CSV, JSON), images (JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC, TIFF), media (MP4, MP3), archives (ZIP), and code files (HTML, CSS, JS). The platform's built-in viewers automatically detect the file type and present it with an appropriate, optimized viewer directly in the web browser for the best possible user experience.

How do I update my hosted file or site?

To update a file hosted on FilexHost, you simply need to upload the new version of the file. The platform will generate a new, unique URL for the updated upload. If you need to maintain the same link, you would use the link from a previous upload that points to the older version. For iterative work, many users leverage the free plan for rapid iterations and then use the Pro plan for the final, permanent version with a consistent URL.

What is a credit worth and how is usage calculated?

Browser requests are charged in credits based on two primary factors: request length and proxy bandwidth. Request time is billed at 1 credit per 30 seconds (or 2 credits per 30 seconds if screen recording is enabled). Proxy usage is billed at 1500 credits per 1GB of bandwidth when a specific proxy_location is used. Each successful request deducts the corresponding credits from your monthly allowance, providing a clear and predictable cost structure for your automation workload.

Does Gaffa offer a free trial period?

Yes, Gaffa offers a free way to experiment with all key features. You can sign up and use the API to build and run automations on a dedicated demo site (demo.gaffa.dev) without requiring a credit card. This allows you to fully explore the API's capabilities, test your automation logic, and understand the platform's value before upgrading to a paid plan for use on the open internet.

What is Gaffa's refund policy?

Gaffa is happy to offer a refund if requested before any credits have been used within the current billing month. This policy ensures that customers can commit to a plan with confidence, knowing they can receive a refund if their needs change before actively consuming resources on the platform. More details are available in the full policy documentation.

Do unused credits roll over to the next month?

No, credits do not roll over from month to month. The credit allowance included with your monthly subscription plan is reset at the start of each new billing cycle. This is a common model for usage-based services and helps keep pricing simple and predictable. It's designed to align with typical monthly operational budgeting for data extraction projects.

FilexHost is a streamlined file hosting and sharing platform in the productivity and management category. It simplifies the process of making files accessible online, allowing users to get a live, shareable link for any document, media file, or web project in seconds without technical setup. Users often explore alternatives to find a solution that better fits their evolving needs. This search can be driven by factors like budget, requiring a different pricing model or a more generous free tier. Others may need specific advanced features, larger file size limits, or integration with other platforms in their workflow that their current stage demands. When evaluating options, consider your growth trajectory. Look for a service that scales with your project volume and file sizes. Prioritize reliability, viewer experience, and security features that match your professional requirements, ensuring the platform supports your next stage of development without friction.

Gaffa is a sophisticated web data extraction and browser automation platform, designed to evolve projects from fragile, DIY coding to simple, scalable API calls. It falls into the productivity and management category, helping teams automate complex data workflows. As projects mature, users often explore alternatives to find a solution that aligns perfectly with their evolving needs, whether due to budget constraints, specific feature requirements like custom integrations, or the need for a different technical approach. When evaluating options, it's crucial to consider your project's growth stage. Early-stage ventures might prioritize ease of use and quick setup, while scaling enterprises need robust reliability, advanced anti-bot circumvention, and hands-off infrastructure management. Key decision factors often include the sophistication of stealth technology, the flexibility of data handling and exports, and the total cost of ownership beyond just the initial price point. The right tool should not only solve today's data challenges but also provide a clear path for future evolution. Look for a platform that abstracts complexity without sacrificing power, enabling your team to focus on deriving insights from data rather than maintaining the machinery that collects it. This ensures your data pipeline scales in tandem with your business ambitions.