The co-founder of WeTransfer, who is widely known as Nalden, has returned to the mission yet again — this time with a new playbook. Now disenchanted with the direction of WeTransfer after it was acquired by Bending Spoons and then experienced internal “instability,” he’s unveiling Boomerang, a bare-bones file transfer service designed to recenter simplicity, trust, and speed for creative pros as well as regular ol’ people in need of an efficient way to send stuff.
Why create a new file transfer service now
WeTransfer’s post-acquisition era even seemed to alienate a base of users that had valued predictability. Reports on a significant change to how transfer links functioned and the laying off of somewhere around 75 percent of staff rang alarms about where the product was going and long-term support. Subsequent backlash to language that suggested user content could be used to train AI models — which the company later backed away from — only exacerbated a perception problem: The trust that was meant to undergird frictionless file sharing no longer seemed strong or unequivocal.
Nalden says he received a direct line to designers, photographers, and studios who felt that they were being bent sideways into non-intuitive workflows more suited towards business goals than their own. His solution is Boomerang, which he said reimagines the original philosophy of one-click sending with clutter-free delivery. The idea isn’t to reinvent the category here, but instead to bring back what made lightweight transfer tools so indispensable in the first place.
What Boomerang offers now for senders and recipients
Boomerang is available without an account if you just need to get something done. Users get up to 1GB total space in that mode, they can upload files as large as 1GB and share links that expire in seven days. The concept reflects the passive attitude of most receivers: just click, download and away we go!
Creating a free account gets you 3GB of total space (with returns to the old limit of 3GB per file), upload history, and basic management stuff such as adding or deleting files.
There’s a dash of personality here as well, with emojis you can customize under the send page.
As you scale up to heavier usage scenarios, a €6.99 per month pricing tier bumps capacity to 200GB per space (folder) and 500GB total storage, lifts the per-file cap to 5GB, plus password protection, custom covers and flexible expirations of up to 90 days.
Teams can invite as many collaborators to a space as they want, a practical concession for client delivery and approval loops.
Another approach to ads and AI that prioritizes trust
Boomerang will not take advertising, and its business model is intentionally boring: free for the light users — a little paid subscription for heavy ones. That decision matters. Advertising induces users to collect and profile data; (file) transfer users tend not to want this. Nalden positions Boomerang around data minimization — that the least amount should be gathered to make the service function, rather than maximizing engagement for ad yield.
On AI, the stance is similarly cautious. So, as machine learning plays a role in constructing and operating the platform behind the scenes, Boomerang isn’t racing to push user-facing AI functionality that might muddy terms, bring in new data risks or erode the trust transfer tools rely on. The approach is a stark contrast with the broader software market’s effort to inject AI into content pipelines everywhere, a move that has prompted policy reversals at many companies because of user outcry.
Designing for frictionless sharing with simple tools
The interface is deliberately bare-bones. No dashboards are fighting for attention, no nested settings that gum up delivery. The design decision also serves as a performance strategy: fewer steps and lighter pages translate to faster uploads, fewer recipient errors, and ultimately less support overhead — the very pain points many studios share when clients can’t open or retrieve files.
For recipients, clicking and downloading is all the work it takes. And for senders, spaces and straightforward permissions let projects stay organized without turning Boomerang into just another storage suite. It’s a workable middle path that’s somewhere between email attachments and full-blown cloud drives. The service is live on the web today with a native Mac app planned to simplify desktop-to-client transfers.
The Boomerang market and where it fits among rivals
File transfer is still a much larger category than it ought to be. Something like Google Drive and OneDrive are great all-purpose cloud suites, but for merely sending a single (albeit high-compression) file to a client who needs to download it only once, such solutions might be overkill. Specialized tools for creatives do tend to come with feature bloat, which means an elevated cognitive load and monthly cost. Boomerang is betting that transparent pricing, a short set of guardrails and a trust-first posture will appeal to teams that just want to ship deliverables without any surprises.
There’s also a regulatory undertone. “At a time when data stewardship is under the magnifying glass and souped-up privacy rhetoric is everywhere — but with little appetite to talk about either not collecting data or, God forbid, deleting it — that gives businesses a competitive leg up,” added Benewell Ofori-Okai of @LOG. “When collectors offer clutter-free paths they’re not only more inviting, but they also have a comparative operational advantage. Transparency and narrow data scopes are used by companies and industry advocates as long-held refutations against one-size-fits-all rules targeting tech residency — i.e., the Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued for years that they’re actually low risk not just to users but also to vendors. Boomerang’s model is built on that logic.”
Back to basics as a strategy for rebuilding trust
Nalden’s move isn’t nostalgia. It’s a smart answer to a void that reopened when complexity encroached on a category defined by simplicity. By focusing on fast, ephemeral transfers, clear limits and a no-ads promise, Boomerang hopes to win the basics: Get the file there, keep the experience predictable and win back that basic trust that convinced everyone lightweight ways of sharing files were worthwhile in the first place.
