Comment by BlueTemplar
3 years ago
That is actually one aspect where I agree with Discord : free hosting isn't free !
(And I would prefer that my files weren't arbitrarily modified by the host. BTW, there is software, like ShareX, which allows you to automatically do operations on files when you capture them.)
Sure, then allow me to send larger files and delete them after a while to reclaim disk space, and/or compress images and videos server-side so they take up less space. Heck, even the old-school ICQ-like direct file transfer, maybe through a proxy server of some sort, would be much, much better than this stupid limit.
You can send larger files if you pay for Nitro - basic is $30/yr and allows 50MB, normal is $100/yr and allows 500MB (they recently upped it from 100MB).
And to be fair to them, they offer a ton of features for free - 8MB seems reasonable IMO - though I do agree that some form of auto-compression if your file exceeds the limits would be nice... on the other hand, the infra to run ffmpeg on videos or imagemagick on photos is not free either...
They already process your images to generate thumbnails so that infrastructure is already in place. Then again, I don't need those files to stick around forever as part of the chat history, my primary use case is to show someone something. No one will come back to that file ever again.
Direct file transfers don't incur any storage costs whatsoever, it's only bandwidth. They also already have the relay servers to support WebRTC calls. They could've solved this problem for little to no additional cost if they wanted to. The problem is that they don't want to.
As for paying, Telegram has mostly the same business model (selling subscriptions but also ads in channels for free users) and allows uploading 1.5 GB files for free. With the premium subscription that is doubled to 3 GB.
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