A share link that doesn't expire in three days

This is the headline difference, and it got sharper with WeTransfer's late-2024 plan overhaul: a free transfer is now deleted after three days, not a week, and the free plan is capped at ten transfers in any 30 days. Paying for Starter doesn't change the clock, transfers still expire after a few days; only Ultimate, at about $23 a month, lets you switch expiry off. That's fine for a one-off handoff, but brutal for anything you reference repeatedly, a resume in your email signature, a media kit in your bio, a spec sheet in a proposal. On Link in Seconds every link is permanent by default on every plan, free included, and Pro costs $9 a month. If you actually want a deadline, Pro lets you set your own expiry date deliberately, the opposite of having one forced on you. You choose when a link dies, instead of the clock deciding for you.

WeTransfer now offers file previews too, the sender chooses preview-only, download, or both, so a preview on its own isn't the difference any more. What is: on the free plan the recipient's page comes with ads, and the preview disappears with the transfer three days later. A Link in Seconds link opens the content directly: PDFs render in a clean canvas viewer, images display full-bleed, Office documents render right in the page, and MP4/WebM/MOV videos play with normal seeking. No ads, no upsell interstitial between your recipient and your file, and the same preview is still there when someone opens the link months later.

WeTransfer does tell you when a transfer is downloaded, on every plan, and can require recipients to verify their email before downloading. The catch is that the tracking ends when the transfer does. Link in Seconds gives every link a free live view counter, so you can see how many times it was opened over its whole life, useful when you've sent a proposal and want to know if the client looked before the follow-up call, or when the same link has sat in your email signature for a year. On Pro, analytics break down by device and country, you can get an email when a link is viewed, and you can ask viewers for their email before they open it. An honest signal of interest, on a link that keeps living.

An honest comparison has to name this. WeTransfer is better when the transfer is both huge and asynchronous, you want to fire off 3 GB now, close your laptop, and let the other person collect it tomorrow, and its Ultimate plan takes up to 1 TB per transfer. Direct Send needs you both present; a hosted link here is permanent but capped at 250 MB per file, even on Lifetime. WeTransfer also does things we simply don't: file requests to collect files from other people, Paid Transfers to sell a file, and WeTransfer Sign for e-signatures. If you need any of those, WeTransfer is the better choice. Link in Seconds is for turning a file into a clean, permanent, trackable link, not for being your drive.

A WeTransfer download page is a dead end, it shut down its Reviews commenting feature in December 2025, so the recipient grabs the file and you never hear whether it landed well. On Link in Seconds Pro you can turn on feedback and comments per link: viewers leave a note or a question right on the shared page, and you get an email for each one. It turns a one-way handoff into a short conversation, a client can say 'approved' or 'can you change slide 4' without a separate email thread. Paired with the view counter, you not only see that someone opened your proposal, you hear back on it, on the same link you already sent.

WeTransfer URLs are random and transient, you'd never put one on a business card, and even its Ultimate plan only brands a page on a yourname.wetransfer.com subdomain. A Link in Seconds URL reads like a real page and, because nothing is scheduled to delete it, it belongs in places a transfer link can't go: an email signature, a LinkedIn bio, a printed flyer's QR code, the footer of a proposal template. Every link ships with a downloadable QR code, so the same permanent URL bridges digital and print. On Pro you can go a step further and serve the link from your own domain or subdomain (like docs.yoursite.com), with automatic SSL, so a branded delivery reads as yours end to end, and you can embed the file straight into your own site with a copy-paste iframe. You paste it once and it keeps working, instead of minting a fresh disposable link every time someone new needs the file.

With WeTransfer, a new version means a new transfer and a new link, and anyone holding the old one is stuck on a dead page. Link in Seconds lets you replace the file behind a link while keeping the exact same URL. Send a client 'quote v1,' then swap in the revised PDF later, and their bookmark now shows the current version automatically. This is the quiet superpower of a permanent link: the URL is a stable address for 'the latest version of this thing,' not a snapshot frozen at the moment you sent it. Combined with view tracking, you can even see who opened it before you updated.

WeTransfer lists password protection under its Ultimate plan and offers email-verified downloads on every plan, so control exists on both sides, the difference is what it is attached to and what it costs. Theirs protects a transfer that, below Ultimate, is deleted within days; here it protects a link that stays. On Link in Seconds Pro you can put a password on a link, set a deliberate expiry date for something genuinely time-sensitive (a limited quote, a pre-launch preview), and turn on view-only mode, which hides the download button so casual saving is deterred. We're honest about the limit: view-only can't stop a screenshot or a determined download, and there's no DRM; Pro can overlay a watermark on PDF previews, which discourages passing them around but, like any tool, can't truly prevent copying. What it does is make a document clearly 'look, don't keep,' which is often all you need for a draft or a shared preview.