FilesHub — a project by Ahsan Mahmood
Laravel platform pairing multi-tenant file storage with 72 developer APIs.
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.
What it does, and what that costs to build
- Multi-tenant object storage (upload/download/delete)
- 72 features over 181 versioned REST endpoints
- Multi-provider transactional email
- Image processing, PDF, QR & barcode generation
- Per-key permissions, origin whitelisting, rate limiting
- Canonical upload backend for the whole ecosystem
- AEO-first discovery layer (llms.txt, pricing.md)
Built with
- Laravel 12
- Laravel Nova
- PHP
- Blade
- Vite 8
- TailwindCSS
- MySQL
Worth knowing
- api
- file-storage
- laravel
- self-hosted
- platform
- backend
Who built FilesHub?
Ahsan Mahmood built it alone, and it runs at fileshub.zaions.com. The Laravel platform, the Nova admin panel, the API surface and the key model are one person's work, and it is the backend the other products on this site upload through. Building infrastructure for yourself has one honest advantage: the first person to hit every rough edge is you.
What can a single FilesHub API key do?
As much as its permissions allow and no more. Each key carries its own granular permissions, an origin whitelist and a rate limit. That is what lets one key reach object storage, email, image processing and the utility endpoints without becoming a key that can do anything. Minting a key with more permission than its job needs is the mistake the model exists to make avoidable, and it is still possible.
Is there an iPhone app for FilesHub?
No, and it would not add much — FilesHub is an HTTP API, so anything that can make a request can already use it, an iPhone included. There is no iOS build here in any case, because there is no Apple Developer account behind this work. The web surface is a browser application rather than an installed one.
Why build a file and email platform instead of paying for one?
Because a paid service in the critical path is a dependency whose price somebody else controls, and this whole practice is arranged so that none exists. Firebase Storage sits on the paid side of that line, so it was ruled out rather than budgeted for. One platform doing storage, email, image work and document generation replaces several single-purpose vendors, and the saving is not theoretical here, because it is the arrangement the other products on this site already run on.
What is FilesHub used for today?
It is the upload backend behind the rest of this portfolio, in production rather than in a demo. That is also the strongest thing that can be said about it: the products listed on this site are its live proof, and each of them can be opened and checked. Anything I could add about performance would be a number nobody else can regenerate.
https://aoneahsan.com/projects/com.aoneahsan.fileshub