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Hello everyone, and welcome to the November 2025 Filen Status Update.
Black Friday has kept us busy, our systems have seen a lot of traffic, and in the background we are working on API 4.0, the Rust migration, and our plans for 2026.
As usual, this post is meant to give you a clear and honest overview of what we have been working on, what has changed, and what is coming next. So let's get started:
Black Friday 2025
This year's Black Friday period went very well for us and was clearly above what we had expected. The practical result is that we have more room to move some long planned topics forward, instead of pushing them further into the future.
Thank you for that!
Over the last years we have invested a lot into our own server hardware and infrastructure. The current sale season was a good real world test for that setup. The higher load and new accounts were handled as expected, without unusual incidents on the infrastructure side.
Financially, Black Friday 2025 gives us extra room to invest back into Filen. We will use this for new team members, more capacity and redundancy in our infrastructure, a budget for marketing and sales, the long awaited external security audit, and especially for the development of our upcoming API 4.0.
API 4.0 is the frame for several topics we already mentioned in earlier updates. This includes Filen Spaces, business plans, family plans, web socket based communication, and more that we are still finalising internally. Some of the preparation is already ongoing. From the outside, most of the effects will show up step by step during 2026. You can read more about this in the other parts of this update, and we will also publish a dedicated blog post about API 4.0 as soon as the internal planning is in a stable state.
Pro Lifetime recap and what happened
Black Friday 2025 was the last time our Pro Lifetime plans were available. For this final round we had set a relatively high internal quota, because we expected it to last roughly until the end of the sale.
In reality things moved faster. From Monday on, the Pro X and Pro 3 Lifetime plans were already sold out. By the end of Wednesday, 03.12.2025, all Pro Lifetime plans were gone. So every Pro Lifetime slot was taken well before the general Black Friday discounts stopped.
We also want to explain what happened at the end of the sale itself. We had communicated that the discounts would run until Sunday night at 00:00. In practice, the sale ended already on Sunday afternoon. Two things came together here: we had configured the end time in the system incorrectly, and around the same time we discovered a separate issue that we had to check and monitor right away. To keep performance stable and avoid risking problems for existing customers during a possible traffic spike, we decided not to reopen or extend the sale on the fly. We understand that this was annoying for everyone who had planned to buy later that day, and we are sorry for the confusion and inconvenience this caused.
A few short points to close this topic:
Pro Lifetime plans will not return in the future. Lifetime plans helped us a lot in the early years, but large one time purchases with a lot of storage are not something we can offer forever in a sustainable way. The Starter Lifetime plan is separate from these Pro quotas and is currently not affected by this change.
Earlier this year we published a separate Hub post called "Lifetime Plans - An Update", where we explained why we want to phase out Pro Lifetime plans and how we are thinking about Lifetime in general.
We have now updated that post so that it reflects the current information after Black Friday 2025. In short: Pro Lifetime plans returned one last time for Black Friday 2025 and are now phased out permanently. The Starter Lifetime plan remains available for now.
Filen
All existing Lifetime plans, including the ones bought during this Black Friday, will continue to receive all features of our B2C cloud product, including future updates and improvements.
For everyone who bought a discounted subscription during the sale: your subscription will renew at the reduced Black Friday price as long as you keep it active. The price only changes if you cancel or switch plans yourself.
Community management and support
In the past we have received a lot of feedback about communication and support: quicker replies, more visible presence on our channels, and clearer information in one place. With the Filen Hub, changes on Discord and a reworked beta program, we have already adjusted some of the structure behind this.
The next step is people, and here there is concrete news. We have found someone for this role. Our new colleague Jason will be taking care of community and support topics. He brings more than 20 years of professional experience with him and has worked as head of support at well known companies. He will not only take over many of the responsibilities described above, but also help us to improve processes, introduce new procedures and, in the long term, build up a larger community and support team.
In his first weeks at Filen, Jason will move through different parts of the company. This includes our support workflows and ticket system, an overview of our infrastructure and product, the Filen Hub and documentation, and our existing community channels. After this onboarding phase he will become more visible on our platforms and gradually take over more of the day to day communication with you.
Our long term goal is that the same people work in support and in community management, so that there is a complete overview of what is happening across all channels and no information is lost between departments. Jason will play a central role in setting this up and shaping how we handle communication with you in the future.
Mobile app survey and separate results post
About 30 days ago we launched a survey about our new mobile app and combined it with a giveaway. The survey has now ended, the giveaway has been drawn, and the winners have received their extra storage on their Filen accounts. Thank you again to everyone who took part and shared their experience with us.
We have gone through the answers and prepared a summary. The full results will not be attached directly to this status update, because that would make this post too long and hard to read. Instead, we are preparing a separate Hub post that will focus only on the survey.
That standalone results post will go online in the coming days. There we will show the main numbers, typical comments and what we plan to change based on them. A link to that article will be added here once it is live.
Many of the comments were about everyday use: performance, background uploads, smaller UI details and how the app behaves across different devices. Most of these points are already being worked on, others move into the next rounds of mobile development and into the planning for 2026. Many have already been fixed by now.
Word mark Filen and patents around API 4.0
In a previous update we mentioned that we have filed the word mark Filen in classes 9, 38 and 42. The application has now been published and confirmed in the first instance. If there are no objections in the current opposition period, we expect the registration to be completed around January 2026.
Separate from the word mark we are looking at several possible patents related to our planned technologies around API 4.0. After internal discussions and research we came to the conclusion that this is worth the effort. Some parts of the planned architecture differ enough from existing solutions that patent protection could make sense.
Because this process is still ongoing, we are careful with very detailed public explanations for now. We do not want to over promise and we also do not want to harm our own position. Once we are further along and can talk more openly without causing problems, we will share more details on the Hub.
Rust migration and what is changing in the SDK
A big part of our current work is the migration from the old TypeScript based SDK to the new Rust SDK. This is not just a 1 to 1 rewrite. We are also moving a lot of responsibilities from the user facing apps down into the SDK itself.
Until now, many things had to be implemented separately in each app when using the TypeScript SDK. With the Rust SDK we are moving more of this logic into a shared core. The idea is that downstream developers, and also our lead devs, can work faster and make fewer mistakes, because more of the heavy lifting is done in one place instead of three or four different codebases.
A concrete example of this is folder uploads. In the past, each app handled folder uploads on its own. Right now, the code for this is being written in Rust inside the SDK. Uploading a folder sounds simple, but in practice it is not. We have to deal with symbolic links that can even create cycles. We need to build and keep an accurate progress bar, the user should be able to pause and cancel the entire process and all of this has to work even when people upload or download hundreds of thousands or even millions of files and folders at once.
Doing this kind of work in TypeScript is possible, but not very efficient. Even in Rust, a naive implementation that scans around 500000 files and folders can easily use 200 to 250 MiB of memory, just to store all paths and file sizes in memory.
This is exactly the kind of case where a low level language like Rust lets us optimise more aggressively. One of our backend developers reworked this by using a string interner and by storing the entire tree structure in a single flat array with optimised indices. With that approach, the memory usage for the same worst case test set of around 500000 files and folders went down to roughly 12 MiB.
The new Rust SDK is full of optimisations of this sort. On the outside you will mostly notice it as fewer stalls, better handling of very large folders and more consistent behaviour across clients. On the inside it means we can reuse tested logic in more places and keep performance issues under better control.
All of this work ties directly into API 4.0, the new sync logic and future features like Filen Spaces and more complex multi user setups. It is one of the reasons why it feels a bit quieter on the feature front right now: a lot of time is going into these building blocks.
Smaller fixes and quality of life work
Besides the large topics there are many smaller tasks that we continue to work through in the background. This includes bug fixes in the mobile app, adjustments in the web interface, usability improvements and internal tools that you do not see directly, but that help us keep support and operations running.
Some of these only show up under higher load, for example during Black Friday or when many people try the same feature at once. Others are small rough edges that are easy to ignore individually but annoying in daily use. We try to reserve part of our time exactly for this type of work, so that the overall experience slowly gets smoother even while big projects are running.
Audit and certifications
External security audits and certifications are a common topic in your questions. Until now our focus here has mostly been on preparing the ground for this: our own hardware in German data centers, a clear infrastructure layout, continuous internal security work and of course API 4.0
With the additional resources from Black Friday 2025 we can now start to plan more concrete steps. We are currently looking at possible audit and certification partners and at which standards are realistic and useful for a zero knowledge cloud provider that runs its own hardware.
The exact scope and order of these measures will probably depend on how the Rust migration and API 4.0 progress, because many areas are technically linked. Our current expectation is that more concrete results in this area will show up in early to mid 2026. When that happens, we will explain them in detail in separate Hub posts.
Status update timing
In the past, our monthly status updates usually came out within the same month they were about. That sometimes meant that the last few days of a month were either missing or only mentioned very briefly.
From now on we will publish each monthly status update at the beginning of the following month. So, for example, this update covers November 2025, but is published at the start of December. This way we can always look at a full month in one go and give you a cleaner, complete overview instead of splitting things across two posts.
What we are focusing on right now
Right now several bigger projects are running in parallel, even if not all of them are visible yet. The main focus areas are the migration to the Rust based SDK, the architecture and preparation for API 4.0, stabilising and improving the mobile app, the further expansion of our infrastructure and the gradual growth of the team, especially in community, support and development. A lot of this is groundwork, but necessary if we do not want to run into the same limits again and again over the next years. After the Rust migrations are done, our Rust dev will move on to the new sync engine for our desktop client.
Closing words
Thank you for staying with us through this backend heavy phase, for your feedback, and for your patience when some things take longer than all of us would like. This years Black Friday helps us to move several of these topics faster than would otherwise be possible.
We will keep you updated here on the Hub, especially around API 4.0, the Rust SDK and migration, the audit work, and everything that changes in the individual apps and clients.
Until the next update
-Team Filen
