blog / We’ve increased file size limits to 200 MB—for free
It’s been a month since we launched universal file sync. Have 10x file limits on us.
When we launched support for syncing all sorts of files in screen.garden a month ago we announced support for syncing any file in your collection that was under 20 MB. We’re happy to announce that we’ve increased this limit to 200 MB without changing our pricing at all. Why? Because we can!
Okay, the actual why—really the how—follows, if you’re curious.
Our non-markdown file sync works differently from markdown (note) sync and has different characteristics: for example, when editing a note that’s synced via screen.garden your edits are extremely fine-grained and are sent to collaborators more-or-less instantly. That makes sense, as you want everyone working in the same document to be on the same page. This doesn’t make as much sense for files like PDFs or images, where you’re typically adding them once and maybe editing them here or there, and in any case there’s no cursor to zoom around or individual characters to watch stream in.
Because of these different characteristics we were able to tune our sync systems differently, and we built file sync to be a little less eager to sync instantly and, in exchange, allow larger blobs of data to be shepherded around. But at launch we still had to choose some limit that we felt behaved well. We landed on 20 MB, and we launched.
Then we asked ourselves: what if…bigger?
We had some vacations and personal time coming up, so this felt like the perfect problem to tinker on while life happened. We tinkered and lived and realized that with some clever engineering we could bump this limit up significantly. The time came to choose a new limit, we are in the end creatures of pattern, and we chose to 10x it to 200 MB.
Oh, and we did it without changing our pricing! We’d love to one day offer plans with even more storage (we still have the 10 GB total storage limit at the moment), but we’re always looking for ways to make screen.garden better without increasing pricing. That’s all for now—happy syncing!