Filen
German zero-knowledge cloud with open-source apps: 10 GB free, 2 TiB at €89.99/yr.
About
Filen is a young German provider (Filen Cloud Dienste UG) betting on a simple pitch: client-side AES-256 encryption with zero-knowledge architecture on every plan including the free 10 GB tier, unlimited bandwidth, and open-source client code under AGPL-3.0. Pricing counts in GiB/TiB — each plan holds about 7 to 10 percent more than the same number in GB — with 200 GiB at €19.99/year, 500 GiB at €39.99/year, 2 TiB at €89.99/year, and 10 TiB at €399.99/year, taxes included, and plans can be stacked on one account. Servers sit in Tier IV, ISO 27001-certified data centers in Germany under EU data-protection law, with 6+3 erasure coding across sites.
Honest limits: it is a small team and its apps have not yet had an independent security audit published. One-time lifetime plans were removed indefinitely in 2026, and free accounts cannot create public share links — it works better as a private vault than a sharing service. You export your own master key, and losing it after a password reset means losing access for good. No published independent performance benchmarks found.
What it can do
- AES-256 client-side zero-knowledge encryption on all plans
- 10 GiB free with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited file sizes
- Open-source clients (AGPL-3.0) for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, web, CLI
- Unlimited bandwidth and stackable paid plans
- Servers in German Tier IV ISO 27001 data centers
- Master-key export with zero-knowledge recovery model
Setup
Sign up for the free 10 GiB plan, download the desktop or mobile app, and let it encrypt locally before upload.
Prerequisites
An email address; paid plans accept card, PayPal, or crypto.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (METRICS tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: pricing, GiB/TiB billing, and lifetime removal from toolradar's Oct 2026 price check; AGPL-3.0 licensing and German data centers from AlternativeTo and makeuseof. Strengths: genuinely zero-knowledge on the free tier, fully open-source clients, lowest annual price at 2 TB with encryption in toolradar's 2026 ranking. Docked for: (1) small provider with no published independent security audit; (2) lifetime plans removed indefinitely and no public share links on the free tier. License: AGPL-3.0 clients; proprietary hosted service.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 6.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · 200 GiB €19.99 / 500 GiB €39.99 / 2 TiB €89.99 / 10 TiB €399.99 per year; lifetime removed indefinitely (toolradar Oct 2026).
- · Apps not yet independently audited (kripeshadwani 2026).
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.