Naldenwho founded the file transfer service WeTransfer in 2009 together with Rinke Visser and Bas Beerens, was unhappy with the company’s direction after the service acquired by Bending Spoon last year – and don’t mince words about it.
“Bending Spoons doesn’t care about people, and even though I know it’s a private equity strategy, I know that since I left (WeTransfer) in 2019, there have been a lot of updates that killed the product, from my point of view,” he told TechCrunch.
After the acquisition, WeTransfer made confusing moves related to the transfer link experience and laid off 75% of its staff. This year, the company was caught in a controversy over using user content to train its AI models and it should backtrack on changes in its terms.
At this point, Nalden had a creative way to express his frustration with WeTransfer. He realized that he wanted to create an alternative to WeTransfer with the service’s original ethos of simplicity. The service is called Boomerang, and you can use it to transfer files without signing in.
“Why do tech companies always make things so complicated? I’ve always struggled with this, and I just wanted to offer another tool that’s just, it’s all about the user experience, it’s ease of use, it’s the simplicity of sharing something quickly, and that just saves time. You don’t need to sign in, you don’t need to verify via email,” Nalden told TechCrunch service.
For regular users, the non-login experience will suffice, but it has its limitations. You can have 1GB of total space, and upload files up to 1GB in size with a seven-day expiration. If you want more, you can choose to create a free account. This will give you 3GB of total space with a file upload limit of 3GB per file. You’ll get access to your upload history, the ability to add and remove files at any time, and the ability to customize emojis on your page when uploading files.
If you want more, there is a €6.99 monthly payment tier, which will give you 200GB per space (folder) and a total storage of 500GB with a file upload limit of 5GB per file. In addition, you will get special caps for spaces, password protection for files, up to 90 days of expiration, and the ability to invite unlimited users to access files on the board.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
Nalden is clear that with this new service, they don’t want to offer ads to users and keep a simple structure for payments. They feel that there is a lot of complexity in the advertising business, and with Boomerang, they want to get the least amount of data from their users.
“I just want to offer a tool that works for the user. It’s like buying a hammer. You may not want to buy a good hammer, but a hammer that only works,” he noted.
Boomerang’s site and interface are barebones, and by design. Nalden notes that much of the design is to please investors, and he feels that removing that experience is a welcome change. While the company wants to add more AI features, Nalden said they generally use AI to build the product, but they don’t want to use user-facing features.
Boomerang is available on the web, but the company says it will soon release a dedicated Mac app.