BetterFileTransfer vs MASV

MASV is not competing with us. It is a pay-per-gigabyte delivery pipe for film and broadcast, priced and certified for people whose contracts specify how their footage moves.

Professional mediaFigures checked MASV

At a glance

BetterFileTransfer and MASV, measured the same seven ways.
MeasurementBetterFileTransferMASV
Send without an accountWhether a first-time visitor can send something without handing over an email address.Yes, up to 100 MBNo, sign-up required
Free transfer sizeThe largest single transfer on the free tier.1 GB15 GB a month, card required
Free link lifetimeHow long a link keeps working before the files are deleted.Up to 30 days5 days of free storage per upload
End-to-end encryptedEnd to end means the provider holds sealed bytes and cannot open them. Encryption "in transit and at rest" is a different, weaker promise: the provider still holds the keys.Yes. End to end, on by default, sealed in your browser before uploadNo. In transit and at rest; MASV holds the keys
Cheapest paid plan$10 / month, or $100 / year$0.25 per GB downloaded
Paid transfer size10 GBNo stated size limit
Storage includedStorage is what stays on the service; a transfer is what leaves it. A product built for one is rarely the best answer for the other.10 GB free, 1 TB on Pro$0.07 per GB a month after 5 days

Limits and prices are set by each service and change without telling us, and a figure we could not confirm reads "not confirmed" rather than being estimated. If something here is out of date or simply wrong, email contact@betterfiletransfer.com and we will correct the row. Say where you saw it and we will check it against their own pages the same way we checked the rest.

MASV charges $0.25 a gigabyte, billed on downloads only, with no subscription and no monthly minimum. Uploads are free. There is 15 GB a month free, though a credit card is required to get it. That pricing model tells you immediately who it is for.

It is a professional media delivery tool. Camera cards, dailies, finished masters. If you are sending a 900 GB shoot to a post house, nothing else on this page is the right answer.

What MASV does well

Volume, and the paperwork around it. MASV is on the Motion Picture Association's Trusted Partner Network roster, and holds SOC 2 Type II with zero exceptions and ISO 27001:2022, alongside GDPR and HIPAA alignment. For a lot of production work those certifications are not a nice-to-have, they are the clause in the contract that decides which tool you are allowed to use.

It also has no meaningful size ceiling and an accelerated transfer path built for moving terabytes across continents, which is a different engineering problem from the one we solve.

Where the two differ

  • The bill arrives afterwards. Pay-as-you-go is exactly right for irregular enormous deliveries and exactly wrong for a predictable monthly habit. A widely shared file costs you every time somebody downloads it. Ours is a flat ten dollars however many times it is fetched.
  • A card to send anything. Even the free 15 GB requires payment details, so there is no such thing as a casual first send.
  • Storage is metered too. Five days free per upload, then $0.07 per GB per month.
  • It is a professional tool with a professional interface. That is a compliment, and it also means it is not what you hand your accountant.

The encryption question

MASV uses TLS 1.2 or better in transit and AES-256 at rest on AWS, with provider-managed keys. It is not end-to-end encrypted and does not claim to be.

For their market that is the correct trade. TPN and SOC 2 are audits of an organisation's controls, and an organisation that literally cannot read the data has a harder time demonstrating some of those controls. Compliance certification and zero-knowledge encryption pull in opposite directions more often than people expect, and MASV has chosen the side its customers are contractually required to care about.

Here the opposite choice is made: we would rather hold bytes we cannot open. If your requirement is written down in a delivery specification, take MASV. If your requirement is that nobody in the middle can read the file, take this. Our note on file sharing and GDPR covers where those two overlap.

What it costs

$0.25 per GB downloaded, falling to $0.19 at volume, plus $0.07 per GB per month for storage beyond five days. A single 500 GB delivery downloaded twice is roughly $250.

Ours is $10 a month for 10 GB per transfer and a terabyte of storage, with downloads not metered at all.

Which one to use

Broadcast, film, anything measured in terabytes or governed by a delivery spec: MASV. Everything else, including most of what people mean by "a big file": this, and you will spend less.

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