What breaks file sharing at an agency is not size — it is that several people send on behalf of one company, and personal accounts do not survive staff turnover. When a designer leaves, every delivery link they created leaves with them, and nobody notices until a client asks for last year's assets.
That, a data processing agreement, and retention you control are what an agency actually needs. Transfer ceilings, which every comparison leads with, come fourth.
I run Yungle, so treat this as interested writing. Claims about other companies come from their own documentation, on the date given; no competitor prices appear on this site.
The four failures that cost agencies money
Links owned by people, not by the company. A freelancer sends a delivery from their own account. Eight months later the client needs it again and the freelancer has moved on. The most common failure, and the most avoidable.
No processing agreement. The moment you handle files with personal data on a client's behalf — customer lists, photos of identifiable people, employee material — you are a processor and it has to be in writing, with your client and with your own vendors. What the GDPR actually requires covers the shape of it.
Retention that is somebody else's decision. Free tiers delete within days. Client contracts often require deletion at the end of an engagement, or retention for a fixed period. A default you cannot change serves neither. Retention is a decision.
Delivery that carries someone else's brand. Your work arriving on a page with another company's logo — and on some free tiers, another company's advertising — reads badly at exactly the wrong moment.
What to require from a vendor
Ask these five in writing. Any serious vendor answers quickly; the ones that cannot are telling you something.
- Can we sign a data processing agreement, and who are your sub-processors?
- Which country do the files sit in, and whose courts can compel access?
- When someone leaves, what happens to the links they created?
- Can we control how long files are kept, in both directions?
- What does the recipient see — our brand, yours, or an advert?
Question two catches more people than the rest combined, because "EU data centre" and "EU company" are different answers. The CLOUD Act piece explains why.
Where the options stand
Dropbox — Transfer checked 21 September 2026: 2 GB free, 7 days, no ads, an account to send. If the agency already runs on Dropbox, it is the path of least resistance, the account structure already exists, and it is a defensible institutional choice. The limits are the small transfer ceiling and that Transfer cannot be bought on its own. It is a US company.
WeTransfer (checked 31 July 2026): 3 GB or 10 transfers free across a rolling 30 days, ad-supported, never-expiring transfers on the top tier only. Clients know it, which has real value. Put the five questions to them directly.
Filemail (checked 1 August 2026): Business lists transfer size as "Any Size". If the agency's problem really is enormous files, this is the specialist.
SwissTransfer (checked 1 August 2026): free, 50 GB, deleted after 15 days unless extended, archives over 10 GB downloaded file by file. Excellent for individuals, not built for shared organisational use, and Swiss rather than EU.
Yungle, mine: on a subscription, collections that do not expire, folders kept as uploaded, client proofing, request links, colleagues with their own named access to one workspace, and delivery on your own domain with your logo and branded emails. Servers in Germany, every file always encrypted with its own key, and a published data processing agreement.
Structuring it so it survives people leaving
Whatever you buy, four habits matter more than the vendor:
- One company account, named members. Not a shared login with the password in a document. Named access makes offboarding a revocation, and gives an audit question an answer. That is what team workspaces are for.
- Deliverables belong to the project, not the person. Organise delivery per client, not per employee, and staff changes stop being data-loss events.
- Write down the retention rule, once. How long client files are kept after a project closes, and who deletes them. Then pick a service that can do it.
- Keep your own backup. No transfer service is your archive — mine included. If losing a deliverable would be a commercial problem, it lives in two places.
Where to start
If the agency already has Dropbox or Google Workspace and nobody is complaining, the honest answer is that switching vendors is not the most valuable thing you could do this quarter — tightening the habits above is.
Switch when a specific failure has cost you: a link that died with an employee, a client asking for a DPA you could not produce, a delivery that looked unprofessional. How agencies use Yungle shows the delivery side; what a business needs from a transfer service covers the smaller-company version of the same decision.