A Google Drive alternative for sending one file to one person
The dialog everyone knows. "Share with people and groups." Then the second row, "Anyone with the link", and a dropdown that says Viewer, Commenter or Editor.
You want none of that. You want to give one person one file, once.
So you pick Viewer, copy the link and hope you didn't leave the folder shared too. Two months later you're not sure who still has access to what, and finding out means clicking through a permissions panel one file at a time.
Drive manages access
Google Drive treats every file as something that lives in your account permanently, with a list of people who can reach it. Sharing is a change to that list.
That's the right design for a document three people edit over a quarter. A delivery has an end, so it needs something else.
You end up managing permanent access to something that only needed to be available for a week. Nothing tells you to clean it up, so nobody does.
A link that expires by itself
Campsend gives the recipient a link that stops working after 30 days. There's nothing to schedule, remember or revisit in a settings panel.
If a week is too long, revoke it and it stops working immediately. The recipient sees a page saying the delivery is no longer available, which is clearer than a Google permissions error.
There's no Viewer, Commenter or Editor, because there's one recipient and one thing they can do with the files.
You find out whether it landed
Drive can tell you a file was opened if you go looking in activity. It's buried, because telling you that isn't what Drive is for.
Campsend records the first open and the first download, and puts both next to the delivery on your Sent page. That answers the question you're left with after sending something, which is whether the other person got it.
Campsend records the first of each and stops there. It won't tell you how many times someone looked, or where they were when they did. That's less than some tools report, and it's the part you can rely on.
Where Drive still wins
Docs, Sheets and Slides. If the thing you're sharing is something two people write together, Drive is the tool and Campsend can't help you.
If you want files organized in folders you can browse for years, that's Drive too. Campsend keeps what you've sent so you can send it again, but it isn't a filing system.
And Drive's free tier is 15 GB against Campsend's 5 GB, which matters if you store everything in one place. Campsend's free plan counts 15 deliveries a month instead, because deliveries are what it's for.
If you'd rather host it yourself
Campsend is open source under the MIT license. Run it on one server with your own object storage and your own SMTP service. A self-hosted install has no limits at all, because plans live in a separate distribution rather than in the code you'd be running.
The self-hosting docs cover the whole thing, from bin/setup to a Kamal deploy.
If the drive in question belongs to a studio rather than to you, client file delivery for creative agencies covers the same problem with several people sending.
Or send a file and skip the dialog.