Tarkle Send
White-label file sharing platform for businesses
Update — March 2026: Cloudbrand is now Sharebrand. We renamed the product in 2025 and moved to sharebrand.com. The story below is unchanged. We updated the ending to reflect where things stand today.
Hey there! I'm Santhiaroo, the founder of Sharebrand, and I want to share how this whole thing started.
It was around April 2024, and I was doing my usual thing — checking some files a team member had shared with a client. When I clicked the link, I was bombarded with pop-ups trying to sell me lifetime deals and limited-time offers. Is this really the first impression I want clients to have? A file sharing platform basically yelling "Buy our stuff"? No way.
So I thought, okay, let's try Dropbox. But for a team of 30 designers, both in-house and contractors, we were looking at $15 per user. Sure, there are some basic branding features, but they come with a ton of stuff we don't need.
Next up, Box. Again, $15 to $25 per user for 30 people. The starter plan tops out at 100 GB of storage and 10 team members.
We already used Google Workspace for emails and admin, but only a few team members had full accounts. The rest used Zoho because it's cheaper. Getting decent storage and team control through Google costs $18 per month per user. It was getting complicated fast. We wanted to own the files as a company, keep access even if someone left the team, but our budget was already stretched across Slack, Figma, Adobe, Deel, and Remote.
What I really wanted was one thing: a way to share files with clients under our own brand. Our name, our logo, our domain on the link. Professional file sharing for our business, not someone else's. That tool didn't exist at a price that made sense.
That's when the idea clicked. I landed on the name Cloudbrand — "cloud" for storage, "brand" for the branding layer. The .com was $15,000, so I started with the .co and .io.
I pulled Ben, one of our project managers, onto the project along with two product designers. Design work started in June.
Ben found a developer with MVP experience. We agreed to finance the project, signed a contract, and he got started. I was out of my depth on the technical side but the developer walked us through everything — tech stack, process, timelines.
Then came the silence. Weeks went by with little news. I kept reminding myself that good things take time.
While we waited, we built a landing page, put the site online, and created Dropbox and WeTransfer comparison pages for Google indexing. Might as well let it start ranking while we built.
A few weeks later, we searched our product name and found a staging page the developer had set up with our landing page on a domain we didn't own. He had started building and deployed it on his own server. When we saw the login page with our name and logo for the first time, we were over the moon.
My co-founder immediately started calculating future MRR. The app wasn't even ready.
We changed scope, negotiated a fair extension, and shipped significant improvements to the MVP. The first beta launched in October 2024. Seven months from idea to working product.
What happened next
After launch, the name kept causing confusion. People heard "Cloudbrand" and expected a consumer cloud storage app with sync, mobile apps, and all the features we never intended to build. That is not what we built.
We built white-label file sharing for businesses. Client-facing businesses — agencies, freelancers, studios, consultants, law firms — that want to share files with clients at their own domain, under their own brand, without a third-party platform's name on the link.
By the end of 2025, we officially renamed the product Sharebrand.
Then in January 2026, we sold Renlar, the design subscription agency I had been running for years alongside all of this. Managing a high-volume client service business was consuming everything. It was the main financial source, generating real revenue, but it was eating the time and focus we needed to build products. We decided to exit cleanly.
Revenue dropped after the sale. The agency had been paying the bills. But exiting forced a clarity I had been avoiding: commit fully to making Sharebrand sustainable, or stay comfortable running an agency forever.
We committed. In March 2026, we acquired sharebrand.com. We had hesitated on buying the .com for Cloudbrand back in 2024 — it felt like too much to spend before we knew what we were building. This time there was no hesitation. If we are asking businesses to trust us with their client relationships, we should own the address that reflects that.
The product has kept growing. We launched a reseller plan that lets agencies and studios run their own branded file sharing platform for their clients — their name, their domain, their pricing — with Sharebrand staying invisible in the background. It is the founding idea extended one step further.
Sharebrand is live at sharebrand.com. Alongside it, I am building Kontrable, a contractor management platform for businesses that work with freelancers and independent contractors. Both products come from the same place: tools I needed and could not find.
If you run a client-facing business and want file sharing that carries your brand, try it free at https://sharebrand.com/.
Originally published October 2024 as Cloudbrand. Updated March 2026.
Hey there! I’m Santhiaroo, the founder of Cloudbrand.io, and I want to share how this whole crazy journey started.
It was around April 2024, and I was doing my usual thing – checking some files a team member had shared with a client. No big deal, right? Wrong. When I clicked on the link, I was bombarded with pop-ups trying to sell me lifetime deals and limited-time offers. I mean, come on! Is this really the first impression I want our clients to have when we share files with them? A cloud storage provider basically yelling, “Buy our stuff!”? No way.
So, I thought, “Okay, let’s try Dropbox.” But geez, talk about expensive! For my team of 30 designers (both in-house and contractors), we’re looking at $15 per user. And sure, they have some basic branding features, but they also come with a ton of stuff we don’t need. Great for some, but not for us.
Next up, Box. Again, we’re talking $15 to $25 per user for my team of 30. They have a starter plan, but it’s super limited – only 100GB of storage and a max of 10 team members. Ugh, back to square one.
Now, we already use Google Workspace for emails and admin stuff, but only a few team members have Google Workspace emails. The rest use Zoho because it’s cheaper. To get decent storage and better team control with Google, you’re looking at $18 per month per user. It was getting complicated fast. We wanted to keep ownership of the files as a company so we could access them even if someone left the team. But our budget was already stretched thin with subscriptions for Slack, Figma, Adobe for some, Deel, and Remote. Adding another big subscription would eat up our small profits, and Gerald, my co-founder, is a bit strict about adding new subscriptions; he hates this.
I looked everywhere but couldn’t find a solution flexible enough to give us the full white-label experience we wanted – sharing files using our agency name instead of Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or whatever.
That’s when the lightbulb moment hit. After a few weeks of brainstorming, I came up with “Cloud” for cloud storage and “Brand” for branding. Cloudbrand was born! The .com was crazy expensive at $15,000, so I grabbed the .co, .io, and some alternatives like trycloudbrand .com and cloudbrandhq .com. (I am still looking for a way to buy it, but now I need some MRR first)
I reassigned Ben, one of our project managers, to this new project, along with two product designers. We started working on the design in June.
While we were designing, Ben started looking for a developer, especially one experienced with MVP, to help us build the app. He first reached out to this guy who’s pretty popular on X (Twitter). Thank God he never replied—we dodged a bullet there! Then, he found someone who seemed like a good match.
After some back-and-forth, Ben confirmed, assuring me that this new guy wasn’t a “joker” (which is our term for someone who talks big but turns out to be unreliable). So, a month later, my co-founder and I agreed to finance the project. The deal seemed reasonable, so we signed a contract with him.
I have to admit I felt a bit out of my depth. I know the agency business inside and out, but software development was new territory for me. However, the developer guided us through everything, recommended tech stacks, and explained the process. This was enough for me. We paid him, and he got to work.
Then came the silence. Weeks went by without much news, and I started to get worried. As an agency owner used to 1-2 day turnarounds, this was really stressful. But I kept reminding myself that good things take time, and I trusted that he knew what he was doing.
While we waited, we didn’t just sit around doing nothing. We put together a landing page and got our website online, describing what we were building and promising a launch in 3-4 months. We even created Dropbox and WeTransfer alternative landing pages and submitted them for indexing. Hey, might as well let Google start ranking us while the app was in development, right?
But a few weeks later, we got a surprise. We searched for Cloudbrand and found another landing page—an exact copy of ours—on a domain we didn’t own. I immediately suspected our developer, and sure enough, I was right! He had started building the base and included our landing page. When we saw the login page with our app name and logo, we were over the moon. It was the first time we saw Cloudbrand coming to life!
My co-founder got so excited that he started daydreaming about our future MRR. I had to laugh—the app wasn’t even ready, and he was already counting our chickens before they hatched!
Then, as we started collaborating more actively with the developer, we realized we needed to change the scope quite a bit. We had to negotiate an extension beyond our initial agreement, but thankfully, he gave us another fair deal. This allowed us to make some significant improvements to the MVP.
And here we are today—the first beta of Cloudbrand is up and running! It’s everything the big names aren’t—simple, affordable cloud storage and file sharing built specifically for digital agencies and 100% focused on collaboration between agencies and clients.
It took us 7 months from brainstorming to developing our first MVP. Some may think it should have been faster, but I’m glad we took our time to build something decent we can be proud of. Thankfully, we didn’t use boilerplate or templates. I’m confident we made the right choice.
Read the full story on Cloudbrand's blog: https://cloudbrand.link/our-story
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