Why we built UploadBird

We tried to fall in love with S3. We really did. But after enough nights debugging CORS, rewriting IAM policies, and waiting for CloudFront invalidations to propagate, we finally admitted what a lot of teams feel: object storage plus a CDN is table stakes, but building a reliable upload experience on top of it is a slog. UploadBird exists because we were tired of reinventing the same fragile pipeline for every product we shipped.

The reality of DIY uploads

The playbook for "just use S3" looks simple until you list the hidden work:

• Design a secure auth model: presigned URLs or temporary credentials? Who can mint them, and where do secrets live?
• Lock down buckets: IAM roles, bucket policies, ACL decisions, per-environment isolation, and logging.
• Get the front end working: drag-and-drop UI, progress, retries, chunking large files, and accessible error states.
• Harden the back end: type/size validation, malware and NSFW scanning, audit logging, and callbacks.
• Deliver globally: CloudFront setup, cache keys, image optimization, video renditions, signed URLs for private files.
• Watch the bill: request costs, egress, invalidations, and surprise inter-region fees.

None of that is core to your product, yet every team reimplements it. We clocked an average of 40–60 engineering hours per project just to get to "acceptable." That cost piles up every time the requirements change.

The moment we snapped

Our breaking point came after a late-night incident: a missing CORS header and an outdated CloudFront behavior quietly broke uploads for a critical release. The fix was trivial; the fallout was not. That night we wrote down everything a file pipeline should do by default—secure auth, fast uploads, smart CDN delivery, and developer-grade observability—and decided to build it once, properly.

What UploadBird promises

• Server-first security: authentication runs on your server, uploads stream to ours. Secrets stay off the client.
• Edge performance: uploads land on the nearest edge and ride a 325k+ node CDN for delivery.
• Built-in safety: file type/size enforcement, malware/NSFW scanning, and audit logs out of the box.
• Media intelligence: on-the-fly image transforms, video renditions, signed URLs for private content.
• Developer DX: type-safe routers, first-class React/Next.js hooks, and meaningful errors instead of opaque 403s.
• Pricing without a calculator: generous free tier, simple plans, transparent overages.

How we built it

We treated the upload pipeline like a product, not a side quest. That meant:

• Designing a type-safe router API so endpoints are declared once and shared across client/server.
• Building middleware hooks so you can attach your auth and business logic before bytes move.
• Adding real-time callbacks for post-upload actions: tagging, database writes, notifications, and analytics.
• Instrumenting every step with logs and metrics so you know when, where, and why an upload failed.
• Optimizing delivery with smart defaults: modern image formats, adaptive video, signed URLs, and cache-friendly paths.

Who we built it for

UploadBird is for engineers who want to ship features, not babysit storage. Whether you're a solo founder or on a platform team, you get a secure, observable pipeline without maintaining scanners, CDNs, and IAM forests. Your product team gets faster release cycles; your finance team gets predictable bills; your users get faster uploads and private-by-default files.

If this sounds familiar

If you've ever lost an evening to CORS, worried about leaking presigned URLs, or wished your CDN could just handle image optimization without glue code, we built UploadBird for you. Spin it up, point your UI at a type-safe endpoint, and keep building the thing your customers actually care about.