FilesHub

Uploads. Transactional email. A PDF, a QR code, a resized image.

Every product needs some of that. Each one arrives as a separate vendor with a separate bill, a separate key and a separate dashboard that nobody ever logs into.

None of them is expensive on its own.

Together they are why a project starts costing money before it has a single user, and why the cost climbs on a curve that has nothing to do with whether anybody is using the thing.

The rule underneath everything on this site is that no paid service sits in the critical path.

Firebase Storage is on the wrong side of that line, so it was ruled out rather than budgeted for. That leaves two honest options: do without file storage and outbound email, or build the platform once and let every project use it.

FilesHub is the second option.

It is a Laravel 12 platform with a Laravel Nova admin panel, exposing 72 features over 181 versioned API routes.

Object storage. Transactional email. Image processing, PDF, QR and barcode generation, URL shortening, and a deep catalogue of developer utilities: hashing, encoding, JWT, conversion, minification, language and spam detection.

One API key reaches all of it, and per-key permissions decide which parts.

Keys carry origin whitelisting and rate limiting, which is what separates a key that may ship inside a browser bundle from one that must never leave a server.

That distinction is the thing integrators get wrong. An origin-restricted key can sit in client code; an unrestricted one cannot. A key listing will not reliably tell you which of the two you are holding, so the only trustworthy answer comes from probing the key itself.

The web surface is Blade and Tailwind, with a public discovery layer of a sitemap, a blog and an RSS feed, and an AEO layer carrying llms.txt, a pricing document, JSON-LD and an allowlist for AI crawlers.

It already runs in production as the upload backend behind the rest of this portfolio.

That is the part worth checking rather than believing. The argument for one self-hosted platform over a stack of single-purpose vendors is not a projection here, because the products depending on it are the ones listed elsewhere on this site.

The first cost is structural.

A platform everything depends on is a single point of failure with a friendly name. One bad hour is every product's bad hour, and there is one person to answer for it.

Per-key permissions are only ever as careful as the person minting the key.

A key holding more permission than its job needs is one leaked bundle away from being the whole platform, and the model can make that avoidable without making it impossible.

72 features is 72 contracts that have to keep holding. A response shape changed carelessly breaks a consumer that will not find out until its next deploy, which may be months later and will not look like my fault.

There is no iOS build. There is no Apple Developer account behind this work either, so nothing here has ever gone to the App Store. For an HTTP API, that limit costs less than it would elsewhere.

Infrastructure is judged on the days nobody thinks about it. The products sitting above this one stopped having a storage question at all.