Files.com is the File Orchestration Platform AWS Transfer Family asks you to build yourself. AWS sells you a part. It puts SFTP, FTPS, FTP, and AS2 in front of an S3 bucket and stops. Everything that makes it a product, you assemble from a dozen more AWS services and Lambda code you maintain: the trading-partner setup, the audit log, the automations, the file conversion, a login system your SFTP users can share.
Files.com ships all of it as one finished product, on day one. Starter is $199 a month, less than a single AWS Transfer Family SFTP endpoint.
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Real companies. Real file flows. Real results.
AWS’s own guide is titled “How Transfer Family can help you build a secure, compliant managed file transfer solution.” The word that matters is build. AWS sells you a part. The finished file-transfer product is your job.
Every example AWS publishes wires AWS Transfer Family together with eight to fourteen other AWS services, plus the API and the login code you write yourself.
Files.com is the better choice: buy it finished instead of building it. You get SFTP, FTPS, FTP, WebDAV, AS2, Automations, Inboxes, Share Links, the Agent, PGP encryption, a complete audit log, and the REST API and seven official SDKs: one product, one price. Your S3 bucket stays right where it is and we connect to it. Your Amazon SNS notifications stay where they are and we send to them.
A sequencing instrument maker replaced AWS Transfer Family and on-premise MFT servers with Files.com, delivering multi-terabyte sequencing runs in hours with HIPAA-grade controls live in a single afternoon.
AWS Transfer Family charges $0.30 an hour for every protocol you turn on, plus $0.04 per GB of data. The hourly charge runs around the clock whether or not a single file moves. The data charge lands near $2,500 a month at a terabyte a day, and past $12,000 at ten.
Because the clock never stops, teams switch protocols on only when they need them. That defeats the point: you are paying for an always-on service and then keeping it off to save money.
AWS Transfer Family added a web app, but it has its own separate logins. A partner who connects over SFTP cannot sign into that web app with the same username and password. You manage two sets of accounts for the same people.
AWS Transfer Family has no built-in concept of a trading partner and no way to convert one file format to another. You write both yourself in AWS Lambda code, then you own, test, and maintain that code forever.
AWS Transfer Family moves files in and out of an S3 bucket. It does that one thing. Everything else that makes file transfer actually work, they make you build — and we just give it to you.
Partner onboarding. They make you build a trading partner out of an AWS login and a folder-naming rule you invent. AWS’s own FICO example needed 145+ infrastructure resources and two custom Lambda functions just for that. We just give you partners as a real, built-in thing: folders that flow one direction, permissions that are enforced, and reporting for each partner.
File conversion and routing. They make you write Lambda code for every JSON, XML, CSV, X12, EDIFACT, or HL7 v2 conversion, because AWS Transfer Family can’t convert a file at all. We just give it to you: files scanned for viruses, converted, and sent to the right place based on what is inside them, the moment they land.
Waiting for the whole file. They make you write code to ignore half-written uploads: AWS Transfer Family writes straight to S3 as a file arrives, so a .filepart object fires an alert and your other systems start working on a file that isn’t finished. We just give you the right behavior: Files.com signals a file has arrived only once the upload is complete, so a half-finished file never starts a job.
AWS sells you the parts to build all three. Files.com ships the partner workflow, the file conversion, and the completed-upload behavior inside the same product that moves the files.
Files.com Starter is $199 a month with every protocol included. AWS Transfer Family is $216 a month just to keep one protocol running ($0.30 an hour across 720 hours), and each protocol is billed separately, before a single file moves.
SFTP, FTPS, FTP, and WebDAV all run from one Files.com site for one price. AWS Transfer Family charges a separate hourly fee for each protocol you turn on.
Files.com reports on each trading partner by name: volume per partner, utilization per channel, and delivery times, in dashboards that come with the product. AWS has no concept of a partner, so it cannot tell you which partner sent what or which channels have gone silent. Any per-partner view is a dashboard you build from raw logs.
Files.com writes every login, upload, download, and permission change to a complete audit log, with export, retention controls, and compliance-grade reports built in. On AWS Transfer Family, raw events land in CloudWatch, and the audit application an auditor can use is yours to build.
SFTP users, the web interface, share links, and single sign-on all use one set of accounts. With AWS Transfer Family, the web app has its own logins, separate from your SFTP users.
Files.com support stands behind the entire product. AWS supports its raw services; the application you built on top of them is yours to keep running. Files.com also carries SOC 2 Type II, a HIPAA BAA, and a GDPR DPA for the product itself.
Price an AWS Transfer Family deployment line by line against the same workload on Files.com, billed annually. Set your transfer volumes, region, users, partners, and protocols. Every AWS number links to the pricing page it comes from, so you can check the math.
AWS charges $0.30 an hour for each protocol you turn on, all year — even when no files move. 2 × $0.30/hr × 8,640 hrs.
Transfer Family pricing — protocol-enabled endpointsAnyone who isn't a script needs a browser to use. AWS bills the Web App at $0.50 an hour, all year, and it's a separate login from your SFTP users. $0.50/hr × 8,640 hrs.
Transfer Family pricing — Web AppsAWS charges $0.04 for every GB that moves, in or out. 24,576 GB this year.
Transfer Family pricing — data uploaded/downloaded12,288 GB/yr × $0.40/GB + per-call charges.
Transfer Family pricing — SFTP Connectors12,288 GB/yr inbound × $0.10/GB. Transfer Family can only decrypt files coming in — to encrypt files going out, you write the code yourself.
Transfer Family pricing — PGP decryption12,288 GB/yr outbound × $0.090/GB in US East (N. Virginia).
Amazon S3 / EC2 pricing — data transfer out2 NAT gateways × $0.045/hr + $0.045/GB. Needed to give partners a fixed IP address they can allow through their firewall, across two availability zones for high availability.
Amazon VPC pricing — NAT GatewayThe plan you need once you use AS2 or GPG. Includes single sign-on, the on-prem Agent, and a custom domain, plus everything in Starter.
1 TB beyond the 2 TB the plan includes, at $100 per TB per month.
Estimated annual savings with Files.com
$13,766
At this workload Files.com costs about 68% less than AWS Transfer Family — $6,469 a year versus $20,235. And you don’t have to build anything. Setting up partners, converting files, the audit trail, the web app your people use, share links, PGP — it’s all already in the box. On AWS you build and run every piece of that yourself.
AWS rates are list pricing as of May 2026 from the AWS pricing pages linked on each line. Files.com figures use published Starter and Power annual list pricing and overage rates. S3 storage is excluded on both sides — Files.com mounts your existing bucket, so you pay the same S3 bill either way. The Lambda / Step Functions orchestration layer AWS has you wire up isn’t priced here; its runtime cost is small and the real cost is the engineering to build it. Run a free trial on a real workload to verify your own numbers.
Regional Files.com sites and remote mounts kept each customer’s data in company-controlled buckets as the storage beneath stable integrations moved from AWS to Google Cloud.
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Clients upload through a browser or SFTP into their own folder, the implementation team edits records in place through the Desktop App, and each client's data stays pinned to its country with every action logged.
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Files.com gave the firm one governed way to meet client-mandated transfer requirements while keeping regulated claims data segregated and auditable.
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A separate S3 bucket for every client makes each claims-data path accountable without forcing the firm to dictate how clients send files.
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A managed SFTP endpoint is one of these six capabilities. Files.com ships all of them on one platform, for about the price of the endpoint.
Dedicated, fully managed SFTP, FTPS, and FTP endpoints, with every protocol your partners already use. No servers to patch and no DMZ to maintain.Replaces IBM Sterling, GoAnywhere, MOVEit, Axway, AWS Transfer Family
See Cloud SFTP ServerBranded portals, secure share links, and request inboxes, plus co-editing for Office documents. Partners and customers get access with no account and nothing to install.Replaces Box, Dropbox, ShareFile, Egnyte
See CollaborationMove files up to 5 TB at full speed over any distance, with chunked, resumable transfers on standard protocols and custom UDP acceleration in the Agent.Replaces IBM Aspera, Signiant
See Fast TransfersTrigger on a file arriving, a schedule, or an event, then route, convert, and notify, with retries and alerts built in. The reliable replacement for the scripts and cron jobs nobody wants to own.Replaces fragile custom scripts and cron jobs
See AutomationsReshape files inline as they move: convert formats and pull fields out of EDI, HL7, XML, JSON, and CSV, so downstream systems get exactly what they expect.Replaces hand-built parsing and conversion scripts
See Transform & ExtractNative apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android mount your cloud storage as a local drive, so you can retire aging file servers and NAS without changing how people work.Replaces NetApp, Nasuni, aging NAS, Windows file servers
See File Server ReplacementEvery capability runs on one platform — SOC 2 Type II certified, HIPAA BAA available, with a complete audit trail on every action.
Files.com has run for 15+ years with zero breaches. The controls your auditors ask about are standard here, not add-ons.
Independently audited, every year.
Certified under FedRAMP 20x at Class A, with Class B in progress.
BAA and DPA available, with EU and regional data residency.
AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2 and 1.3 in transit.
SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning, MFA, and granular role-based access.
Every action logged immutably and streamed to your SIEM.
No Level 1 runaround, no script, no callback queue. When something breaks, you reach a seasoned file transfer expert who can actually fix it.
Talk to file transfer experts who understand how you work.
A dedicated Customer Engineer and a step-by-step plan — most teams are live within five business days.
Clear documentation, training materials, and how-to guides.
“Files.com's strengths are simplicity, ease of use, and the cloud connectors. We don't have to invent custom infrastructure for every partner.”
“Files.com is versatile — it can manage many different situations from a single platform. We've consolidated multiple tools onto it.”
“Files.com is robust and scales to a large enterprise. We get multiple files per minute, per second — and we're a 24/7 organization, so everything has to always be up.”
What buyers ask most when comparing Files.com to AWS Transfer Family.
Yes. Files.com Starter is $199 a month with every protocol included. AWS Transfer Family runs about $216 a month just to keep one protocol running. That is the published $0.30 an hour across the 720 hours in a month, and each protocol you add is billed separately, plus $0.04 per GB of data and the other AWS services you wire up around it. So Files.com is cheaper than one AWS Transfer Family SFTP endpoint before a single file moves, and the gap widens at real volume once data charges, AS2 messages, and everything you build yourself are added in.
AWS Transfer Family is only a front door. It puts SFTP, FTPS, FTP, and AS2 in front of an Amazon S3 bucket, and that is all it does. The trading-partner setup, the audit log, and the file conversion are all yours to build with AWS Lambda code. Files.com is the finished product. All of that comes built in, and we run it, in front of the same S3 bucket you already have.
No. AWS Transfer Family has no built-in concept of a trading partner. A partner is just an AWS login plus a folder-naming rule you make up. AWS published its own design for a FICO use case that needed 145+ infrastructure resources and two custom Lambda functions to fill that gap. Files.com builds partner onboarding right in: each partner gets directional folders, permissions the platform enforces, and its own activity reporting.
Yes. Files.com connects to your existing Amazon S3 bucket and reads and writes to it live. There is no copying and no second copy of the data, and it stays encrypted right where S3 keeps it. The bucket can be your own or a partner’s, and you do not move any data to switch over to Files.com.
No. AWS Transfer Family cannot convert files on its own. Every JSON, XML, CSV, X12, EDIFACT, or HL7 v2 conversion is custom Lambda code you build and maintain. Files.com converts files as they arrive: JSON, NDJSON, CSV, XML, X12, EDIFACT, HL7 v2, and YAML, all built in.
AWS Transfer Family added a web app in December 2024, but it has its own separate logins from the SFTP users. A partner who connects over SFTP cannot sign into that web app with the same username and password. Files.com uses one set of accounts across SFTP, the web interface, share links, and single sign-on, so every way in shares the same logins and permissions.
On AWS Transfer Family, they can. It writes uploads straight to S3 as they arrive, so S3 sees a temporary, half-written file (a .filepart object) and fires an alert while the file is still uploading. Your other systems can start working on a file that is not finished yet, unless you write extra code to ignore the partial one and wait for the real one. Files.com only signals that a file has arrived once the upload is fully complete, so a half-finished file never starts a job or lands where it shouldn’t.
Files.com scans incoming files as they upload, before anyone can open, download, or edit them. It marks each file Clean, Malicious, or Suspicious and moves flagged files into a quarantine folder you set up. On AWS Transfer Family, you build scanning yourself: the triggers, what happens to the results, and where flagged files go are all yours to write.
Yes. The AWS Transfer Family pricing calculator on this page prices a deployment line by line: protocol endpoints at $0.30 an hour each, $0.04 per GB of data, AS2 messages, S3 storage, internet egress, VPC and NAT, and Secrets Manager. Every AWS number links to the pricing page it comes from, and it shows the same workload priced annually on Files.com Starter or Power.
Yes. Files.com is sold as an annual contract on AWS Marketplace, so it counts against the AWS spend you have already committed to and you don’t have to onboard a new vendor. The contract is annual, not billed by usage.
Yes. Files.com is an AWS partner, sold on AWS Marketplace against your committed AWS spend, and we exhibit at AWS re:Invent every year. Come find us at the show. Teams across the AWS ecosystem run their file workflows on Files.com, in front of the same S3 buckets they already operate.
Files.com is cheaper from day one and removes the code you would otherwise maintain forever. Starter is $199 a month, less than one AWS Transfer Family SFTP endpoint, and it includes the partner workflows, file conversion, audit log, and automations that on AWS are Lambda code your team writes, tests, and owns. Files.com support also covers the whole product; AWS support covers its services, and the application you build on them is yours to keep running.
If you choose AWS Transfer Family, you will be building for weeks and maintaining code forever. The partner workflow, the file conversion, and the audit log all become Lambda code you write, test, and own.
The better choice is Files.com. Every protocol, the partner workflow, the audit log, the automations, and the file conversion run on day one, in front of the same S3 bucket you already have. Connect your bucket with the S3 integration, keep sending Amazon SNS notifications, and buy it through AWS Marketplace against the AWS spend you’ve already committed to. Start a 7-day free trial on a real workload first.
Every protocol, the partner workflow, the audit log, and the file conversion, in one product, in front of the S3 bucket you already have. Talk to our team or run a 7-day free trial on a real workload.
No pushy sales process