We needed white-label file sharing for our agency. We couldn't find it. So we built Sharebrand

Update — March 2026: This post was originally published in October 2024 under the name Cloudbrand. We have since renamed the product Sharebrand and moved to sharebrand.com. The story below is unchanged. We updated the ending to reflect where things stand now.

Hey there! I'm Santhiaroo, the founder of Sharebrand (Formerly Cloudbrand), 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 our clients to have? A cloud storage provider basically yelling "Buy our stuff"? No way.

So I thought, okay, let's try Dropbox. But for my team of 30 designers, both in-house and contractors, we were looking at $15 per user. And sure, they have 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 a team of 30. They have a starter plan, but it's limited to 100 GB of storage and a max of 10 team members. Back to square one.

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. To get decent storage and team control with Google, you're looking at $18 per month per user. It was getting complicated fast. We wanted to keep ownership of files as a company so we could access them even if someone left the team. But our budget was already stretched thin with Slack, Figma, Adobe, Deel, and Remote.

What I really wanted was simple: a way to share files with clients under our own brand. Not Dropbox's brand, not Google's brand. Ours. A clean, professional experience with our name, our logo, and our domain on every link we sent to clients. I could not find a file sharing tool for businesses that did this at a price that made sense.

That's when the idea hit. I landed on the name Cloudbrand — "cloud" for cloud storage, "brand" for branding. The .com was going for $15,000, so I grabbed the .co and .io to start.

I reassigned Ben, one of our project managers, along with two product designers. We started on the design in June.

Ben found a developer experienced with MVPs. After some back-and-forth, we agreed to finance the project, signed a contract, and he got to work.

I'll admit I felt out of my depth. I know the client-facing business side inside and out, but software development was new territory for me. The developer guided us through the tech stack and the process. We paid him and he got started.

Then came the silence. Weeks went by with little news. Stressful, as someone used to one to two day turnarounds. But I kept reminding myself that good things take time.

While we waited, we weren't sitting around. We built a landing page, got the website online, and created Dropbox and WeTransfer comparison pages for indexing. Might as well let Google start ranking us while the app was in development.

A few weeks later, we searched for our product name and found a staging page the developer had set up — our landing page on a domain we didn't own. I immediately suspected our developer, and I was right. He had started building and included our landing page on his staging environment. When we saw the login page with our name and logo for the first time, we were over the moon.

My co-founder got so excited he immediately started daydreaming about our future MRR. I had to laugh — the app wasn't even ready.

As we started collaborating more actively, we realized we needed to change scope. We negotiated a fair extension and made significant improvements to the MVP.

The first beta launched in October 2024. Seven months from brainstorming to a working product. Some may think it should have been faster. I'm glad we took the time to build something we're proud of.

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 planned to build. That is not what we built, and it was costing us.

We built white-label file sharing for businesses. The specific use case: client-facing businesses — agencies, freelancers, studios, consultants, law firms — that want to share files with clients at their own domain and 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. The name reflects exactly what it does.

Then in January 2026, we sold Renlar, the design subscription agency I had been running alongside all of this. Managing a high-volume agency was taking over everything. It was the core financial source for years and generating real revenue, but it was consuming the time and energy we needed to build products. We made the decision to exit so we could focus entirely on Sharebrand and Kontrable, a contractor management platform I have been building in parallel.

Revenue dropped significantly after the sale. The agency was paying the bills. But the exit forced a clarity I had been avoiding: either we commit fully to making Sharebrand sustainable, or we stay comfortable running an agency forever.

We committed. In March 2026, we acquired sharebrand.com. We had been hesitant to buy the .com for Cloudbrand when we started — $15,000 felt like a lot for a domain when we were not sure what we were building. This time we did not hesitate. If we are asking businesses to trust us with their client relationships, we should own the address that reflects that commitment.

Since then the product has kept moving. We launched a reseller plan that lets agencies and studios run their own branded file sharing platform for their own clients — their name, their pricing, their domain — with Sharebrand handling the infrastructure invisibly. It is the same founding idea extended one step further.

Sharebrand is live at sharebrand.com. The team builds software full-time now. If you run any kind of client-facing business and you want file sharing that carries your brand rather than someone else's, you can try it free at sharebrand.com. No credit card required.