On this page
Happy new year, and welcome to the first Filen status update of 2026. This time we are combining December 2025 and January 2026 into one post. Internally, we had a holiday period, and for roughly two weeks we focused on keeping everything stable and handling the essentials. Instead of publishing two short updates, we are bundling both months into one that has real substance.
Black Friday was a big success, and we are genuinely grateful for the support. It was an important milestone for us and a strong end to the year. With that said, let us get started.
Rclone officially merged upstream in v1.73
After months of waiting, beta testing, and community feedback, our rclone backend has been merged into the official rclone project.
With rclone v1.73, Filen is now available as a native backend in a standard rclone installation. No custom builds, no separate downloads. This is a major milestone for power users, NAS setups, headless servers, automated backup workflows, and anyone who wants Filen to fit into existing rclone tooling without friction.
We already published a standalone post with setup instructions and examples, so we will keep it shorter here. The important part is that this is now real upstream support, and it also lays the groundwork for more advanced integration work on our side later.
Jason
Scaling, infrastructure, and the traffic reality after Black Friday
Black Friday itself went very smoothly, but the real impact showed up in the weeks after. Instead of traffic returning to normal levels, overall usage stayed consistently high. That is a great sign for Filen, but it also means we have been operating much closer to our capacity limits than we originally planned for this period.
In parallel, we have been doing a lot of behind the scenes work to keep performance and reliability where they should be while the system is under sustained load. Some of that work creates additional internal traffic, because it involves rebalancing and background operations that help us stabilize and prepare for the next expansion steps. None of this is a crisis, but it is exactly the kind of situation where we prefer to act early and responsibly rather than pushing things too far.
Over the last weeks, several factors stacked on top of each other:
- Sustained high usage after Black Friday
Demand exceeded our planning assumptions, and instead of dropping back to normal, upload and download activity stayed unusually high. - Additional internal load due to stabilization and rebalancing work
Following a short disturbance, we intentionally prioritized stability work. Some of that includes internal rebalancing and background operations that temporarily add load while they run. - The market for data center hardware is really tight right now.
Availability is generally difficult regardless of pricing, and (short notice) scaling has become much less flexible than it used to be. Many suppliers are operating at high utilization with capacity planned far ahead, so lead times for standard server and storage components are longer and less predictable even when expansions are already planned and budgeted.
Individually, none of these would be a big deal. Combined, they increase pressure on capacity and internal throughput. That is why we made a precautionary decision:
Starter Lifetime Update
A few weeks ago we published a standalone Hub post explaining why we paused new purchases of the Starter Lifetime Plan.
Filen
This does not affect anyone who already has a Starter Lifetime plan. Nothing is being taken away, and existing plans remain active as usual. The service is operating normally, your data is safe, and encryption and privacy are unchanged.
What we want to add here is the longer term perspective. The current hardware situation was the trigger, but the decision is also about building a more sustainable model going forward. Lifetime plans were helpful during earlier phases because they enabled bigger investments. Thanks to the strong support we received around Black Friday and beyond, we can take a more conservative approach and prioritize reliability, especially while hardware availability remains unpredictable.
With that in mind, the Starter Lifetime Plan will remain unavailable for new purchases for an indefinite period.
Because hardware availability and lead times are still uncertain, we cannot give a reliable ETA for when the Starter Lifetime Plan will return, and at this point we also cannot guarantee that it will return at all. For now, the plan stays paused while we continue expanding and stabilizing. Once the next expansion steps are fully deployed and internal load levels are comfortably back in range, we will reassess and make a clear call based on the market conditions at that time. If the supply situation does not improve enough to offer this plan responsibly and sustainably with the long term future in mind, we may keep it unavailable permanently.
We are in direct talks with suppliers and drive manufacturers about availability and lead times, and we will keep everyone updated through the Hub as the situation develops.
Dedicated senior developers
Over the last months it became increasingly clear that our 2026 roadmap needs more dedicated development capacity, especially because several large projects are tightly connected: SDK migrations, the sync rewrite, API v4, and Filen Spaces.
That is why we have opened a new hiring push and are now explicitly looking for senior developers.
Our internal plan is to fill three developer roles by the end of the year, with at least one of them being a Senior Full Stack Developer. In parallel, we are still looking for dedicated mobile developers for iOS and Android work.
Hiring is not instant. We are conducting many interviews and being selective because Filen is not a typical app stack. There is a lot of crypto-sensitive logic, performance work, and infrastructure-aware engineering involved.
If you are reading this and you are a strong match for our stack and mindset, we would genuinely love to hear from you.
You can find all further details in our job posting.
Filen
Structural changes legal form and location inside Germany
This section is less exciting, but it matters for long term operations.
We are currently preparing a few structural changes at the management and operations level:
- We are moving the company location within Germany to be closer to our data center operations and infrastructure workflows. This reduces friction for on site work, logistics, and coordination.
- In parallel, we are transitioning our legal form from UG to GmbH.
In practice, this is about building a more mature structure around the company as Filen grows. It helps with long term planning and operational stability, and it reduces small company overhead in areas that are increasingly irrelevant to what we actually want to spend our time on: shipping good software and running a reliable service.
Rust SDK and the 2026 tech roadmap
A lot of what we are working on right now is still foundation work. It is not always visible immediately, but it is the kind of work that decides how fast we can move later, how predictable behavior is across platforms, and how stable everything stays as the product grows.
Rust SDK close to completion
The new Rust SDK is very close to being finished. It will replace the older TypeScript SDK as the primary shared core for Filen clients. Most of the changes are internal at first, but they matter: one common implementation, clearer boundaries, better performance characteristics, and fewer platform specific differences over time.
Once the SDK is fully done, we will finish and polish the remaining client migration step by step, with web and mobile being the main focus.
Migrations and sync engine rewrite in parallel
After the Rust SDK reaches a stable, complete state, we will start two tracks in parallel: finishing the remaining client migrations and starting the sync engine rewrite. The sync rewrite is focused on improving reliability and consistency, making behavior more predictable, and deliberately covering the edge cases that show up in real world workflows. That includes more robust handling of unusual change patterns, better conflict handling, and clearer rules for how and when changes are applied across devices. The client migrations will also bring a few quality-of-life and performance improvements, since running everything in native Rust makes a noticeable difference in those areas.
API v4, Spaces, and the next platform layer
Once the Rust SDK rollout and the sync rewrite are in a good place, the larger focus shifts to API v4 and the groundwork for Filen Spaces. This is where bigger architectural changes come in: security and performance improvements, a more efficient communication layer, and a new approach to how state and metadata are handled. The goal is a noticeably faster experience, especially when browsing large accounts, with fewer round trips and less waiting for the UI to catch up. Our internal tests so far look promising, but this is still the kind of work where we prefer to validate carefully before making hard promises.
Business plans and family accounts come later
A quick expectation setting note: API v4 and Spaces are not the same as business plans or family accounts. The first releases will be about building the core platform correctly for normal user accounts. Once that foundation is shipped and proven, it becomes much easier to package it into user facing tiers that actually make sense. We will communicate more concrete details when the v4 work is far enough along that timelines and scope stop moving.
Closing words
That is it for this combined update.
December and January were a mix of holiday slowdown, operational planning, and some genuinely exciting progress, especially with rclone now officially supporting Filen and with the next stage of our technical foundation getting closer to ready.
Thank you for your support, your patience, and your trust. We will keep doing what we have always done: staying transparent, prioritizing reliability, and building Filen in a way that is sustainable long term.
Until the next update,
Team Filen
