An alternative to AWS Transfer Family

About US$219 a month per enabled protocol, before any files move: AWS bills US$0.30 per protocol per hour (roughly 730 hours in a month), whether the endpoint is used or idle. Data is then metered at US$0.04 per gigabyte in each direction - and on downloads AWS's standard data-transfer-out charge (US$0.09/GB at the first tier) stacks on top, so a gigabyte leaving costs about US$0.13 while a gigabyte arriving costs US$0.04 (ingress itself is free; Transfer Family still meters it). Enabling a second protocol - say FTPS alongside SFTP - doubles the endpoint fee. Figures are AWS's published us-east-1 rates, linked under the comparison table.

No - Transfer Family is not part of the AWS free tier, so the per-protocol hourly charge applies from the first hour. DocEvent's Basic plan is free forever for up to five users, with 200MB of transfer and 5,000 operations a month included - enough for a light partner feed, and a working way to evaluate before paying anything.

For a small number of partners with modest traffic, a managed per-user service is hard to beat: DocEvent starts free for up to five users on your own bucket, and paid plans are $2 per user per month billed in blocks of five, with extra transfer at $10 per 10GB. At terabyte volumes or millions of files, contact us for custom pricing, or run the flat-rate SFS Server from the AWS Marketplace - hourly software pricing through your AWS bill, with no per-GB or per-operation fees.

The billing model differs. Transfer Family charges per enabled protocol, per server, per hour - about US$219 a month for a single protocol running continuously, before any data moves. DocEvent's managed service is billed per user per month, starting free for up to five users, so an endpoint that sits idle overnight or at weekends costs you nothing extra.

Yes. The managed plans meter both data transfer ($10 per extra 10GB) and operations ($10 per extra 100,000), and Transfer Family meters neither, so at terabyte volumes or very high file counts it can work out cheaper; at that size use our self-hosted SFS Server from the AWS Marketplace instead, which is flat-rate with no per-GB or per-operation fees. If what you need is AS2, note that it is not part of this file service on either side of the comparison - Transfer Family offers it as a separately billed protocol, and DocEvent offers it in Channels, our partner file-routing product, where signing, encryption and MDN receipts (synchronous, asynchronous or none) are all managed for you. AS2 in Channels is free while in preview, and its pricing after that follows the same per-user model as the file service, with operations included in each plan.

Yes. DocEvent is the transfer endpoint, not the storage. Files land in your own bucket under your own credentials, so your encryption, versioning, Object Lock, lifecycle and region-residency rules all still apply. Nothing is stored on our servers.

Yes, and this is a real difference. Transfer Family supports Amazon S3 and EFS. DocEvent also supports Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake and Files, Google Cloud Storage, and any S3-compatible store such as Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Wasabi or MinIO - including several backends behind one account.

Usually minutes. Create a service pointed at the same bucket, add a user for each partner or system, then change the hostname and credentials at the sending end. There is no VPC, endpoint, IAM role or CloudFormation stack to build, and you can run both side by side while you cut over.

Bring them across. DocEvent supports SSH public-key authentication as well as passwords, so partners that already authenticate with a key can keep using the same key. Usernames are yours to choose, and root username aliasing on the Premium plan lets you keep existing paths intact.