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The real cost of building your own file uploader.

Rolling your own file upload stack sounds cheap — until you tally the engineering hours, the infrastructure bill, and the years of maintenance. Move the sliders. See what it actually costs.

1
Set your scenarioMove the sliders on the left
2
See the gapDIY cost vs Filestack subscription
3
Skip the buildStart a free trial in 60 seconds
1 Your scenario

Tell us about your build

Engineers on the build
Full-stack devs assigned to the uploader
2
Average loaded salary
US median ~$120k base × 1.4 benefits/overhead
$168k
Initial build time
Auth, chunked uploads, retries, S3, CDN, image transforms
5 mo
Ongoing maintenance
One dedicated engineer, % of their time, every month
25%
Monthly uploads
New files written per month — drives Filestack plan tier
Stored data (GB)
Total GB sitting in S3 Standard at steady state
Monthly bandwidth (GB)
CloudFront egress — downloads, previews, retries
Monthly transformations
Lambda image resize/convert invocations
Time horizon
How long you'll run this thing
3 yrs
Filestack add-ons $59/mo minimum, then usage + add-ons
These apply to the Custom build view on the right. Toggling any add-on switches the comparison to Custom automatically.

Max file size limit

Performance & infrastructure

Auth & security

AI / Intelligence

Processing & UI

Add-on subtotal $0 / mo
2 The comparison

Here's what each path costs

Filestack pricing
⚠ DIY Build

Build it yourself

$420k
~$11,667 / month
VS
✓ Filestack

Filestack Start

$2k
$69 / month
You'd save
$413k
over 3 years — that's 98% off DIY

DIY cost breakdown — how the math works

Initial engineering build——
Ongoing maintenance——
Infrastructure (S3 storage + CloudFront + Lambda)——
Security & compliance audits——
Opportunity cost (delayed roadmap)——
DIY total—
Start free trial — skip the build Talk to sales

Cumulative cost over time

DIY costs front-load on the build, then keep climbing. Filestack stays flat.
Build it yourself
Filestack

What you’d actually be signing up for

The DIY estimate isn’t just engineering hours. Here’s everything that lands on your team — and what Filestack absorbs instead.

What you're solving
If you build it
With Filestack
01Engineering time
Months of work: chunked uploads, resumability, virus scanning, MIME validation, signed URLs, retry logic.
A drop-in SDK and one API key. Production-ready in an afternoon.
02Maintenance
Browser quirks, expired certs, SDK bumps, CVEs. 15–25% of build cost — every year, forever.
We patch, monitor, and update. Your team ships features instead.
03Infrastructure
S3, CloudFront egress, Lambda transforms, image workers — an AWS bill that scales with users.
Storage, CDN, and transformations bundled into one predictable monthly price.
04Security & compliance
SOC 2 and GDPR audits — pen tests, documentation, and engineering review every cycle.
SOC 2 Type II and GDPR ready out of the box. Audits already done.
05Opportunity cost
Every sprint on plumbing is a sprint not spent on what actually differentiates your product.
Your roadmap stays focused on the features your customers actually pay you for.
06Bus factor
The senior engineer who wrote the retry logic leaves. Now nobody understands it.
The expertise lives on our side of the API. Onboarding a new dev takes minutes.

Sources & methodology. Salary defaults from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics OES (Software Developers, 15-1252) and Levels.fyi US Software Engineer medians (~$120k base) with a 1.4× loaded-cost multiplier for benefits, payroll tax, equity, and overhead — see SBA’s “true cost of an employee”. Maintenance range (15–25% of build cost / yr) is consistent with the long-run maintenance share discussed in ISO/IEC 14764 & Lientz–Swanson surveys and Fowler on technical debt. SOC 2 + pen test annual figure ($25k) reflects published ranges from Secureframe and Vanta. Infrastructure uses AWS us-east-1 list prices: S3, CloudFront, Lambda. Filestack plan prices from filestack.com/pricing.