French startup Infinit is now competing directly with CloudApp and Droplr with a new premium offering and a streamlined sharing experience. Until now, Infinit was mostly focused on improving the sharing features between Infinit users, but this time the company is focusing on sending big files to non-Infinit users.
At first, Infinit developed peer-to-peer applications to share huge uncompressed video files or graphic assets without breaking a sweat. You could shut down your laptop and the upload process would seamlessly resume later. And if you were on the same network, Infinit would use your local network instead of going through the Internet.
All of this is still here and absolutely free. If you want to send a 250 GB photo folder to your coworker, you still can as long as you both have Infinit.
But what if you are a movie production company and you need to send a movie to various film festival juries? Some companies send a FedEx with a DVD or BluRay, others use WeTransfer.
Infinit is addressing these needs directly with a few features and a new premium plan. For $9.99, you get 100GB of online storage with direct links to your file. You still upload a file using Infinit’s client, but you get a shareable link. There are also custom plans for companies that need more storage. Free accounts will only get 1GB.
The download links were already there, but now it’s on steroids with many features borrowed from competitive services. You can now brand your page, choose whether these links should expire, use custom domains, add a password and more.
Similarly, you can now upload a screenshot to Infinit with a keyboard shortcut and get a link copied directly to the pasteboard. This is probably what have made CloudApp and Droplr popular in the first place. In addition to the OS X, Windows, Android and iOS apps, Infinit is now available on Linux as well.
These links will have a nice side effect as well. The more people use Infinit to share stuff on Twitter or Facebook for example, the more people will start noticing these links and end up trying the service.
Infinit still truly shines for teams that need to work with huge files. The killer feature remains the ability to send 50 GB to your coworker whether they are sitting next to you or at home, online or offline.
But these new features make Infinit a ubiquituous file sharing solution. If you didn’t use Infinit because you don’t need to share big files very often, you might think about it now that it’s already the app that you use to share screenshot on the web.
