Updated August 2026
    Slowing down
    16k

    transfer.sh: Maintenance, Licence and Alternatives

    Easy file sharing from the command line.

    TL;DR • transfer.sh • as of August 2026

    transfer.sh is an open-source file transfer project, with 16k GitHub stars and a health score of 35/100. It committed 3 times in the last twelve months across 3 of those months, and its status is slowing down. Licence: MIT. It does not currently meet the momentum threshold, so verify maintenance before depending on it.

    16k
    GitHub stars
    35/100
    Health score
    3
    Commits (12 mo)
    3/12
    Active months

    Maintenance health

    Status Slowing down — Commits have thinned out over the last year.
    Last commit 2026-06-13
    Days since last commit 65
    Commits, last 3 months 1
    Commits, last 12 months 3
    Months with activity 3 of 12
    Last release 2023-12-04
    Archived No
    Licence MIT
    Category File Transfer

    Health score combines commit recency, twelve-month commit volume, months with activity, release recency and archive state. Metadata refreshed August 2026.

    What the licence lets you do

    MIT

    Permissive (MIT, Apache, BSD): you can fork it, close the source and sell it. Lowest legal friction for a commercial product.

    This matters most when you plan to sell a hosted version. A permissive licence means anyone — including a competitor with more capital — can do the same, so your defensibility has to come from distribution, support or data, not from the code.

    What transfer.sh means for your idea

    Crowded · 74/100
    File Transfer category →

    transfer.sh is not currently shipping at a healthy pace. Popular but stalled projects inflate how competitive a category looks — and they are also risky to build on.

    Assume every prospect can find a free version in five minutes. Your wedge has to be something open source structurally cannot deliver: compliance, support SLAs, managed hosting at scale, or a workflow the maintainers refuse to build.

    transfer.sh: common questions

    Is transfer.sh still maintained in 2026?

    Slowing down. transfer.sh recorded 3 commits over the last twelve months, with activity in 3 of those months and 1 commits in the last quarter. Last commit: 2026-06-13. Last release: 2023-12-04. Commits have thinned out over the last year.

    Can I use transfer.sh commercially?

    transfer.sh is published under MIT. Permissive (MIT, Apache, BSD): you can fork it, close the source and sell it. Lowest legal friction for a commercial product.

    How crowded is the File Transfer category?

    58 open-source implementations, 28 of them actively maintained, led by copyparty at 46k stars. Saturation score 74/100 — Crowded. Free, maintained alternatives already dominate this category.

    transfer.sh alternatives in File Transfer

    copyparty

    File Transfer

    46k

    Portable file server with accelerated resumable uploads, deduplication, WebDAV, FTP, zeroconf, media indexer, video thumbnails, audio transcoding, and write-only folders, in a single file with no mand

    Actively maintained
    Real momentum
    MIT

    SeaweedFS

    File Transfer

    34k

    SeaweedFS is an open source distributed file system supporting WebDAV, S3 API, FUSE mount, HDFS, etc, optimized for lots of small files, and easy to add capacity.

    Actively maintained
    Real momentum
    Apache-2.0

    Transmission

    File Transfer

    15k

    Fast, easy, free Bittorrent client.

    Actively maintained
    Real momentum
    GPL-3.0

    Competing with free? Check the market first.

    IdeaProof scores your idea against live competitors, market size and 1,000+ documented startup failures in about two minutes.