We didn't want to be your storage company
Six months into Creatr's first year, a photographer emailed me asking a question that stopped me cold: 'If I use your app, where do my actual files live?' She wasn't being difficult. She had 200GB of shoots spread across Google Drive, Dropbox, and an external hard drive. The idea of uploading everything to us felt wrong to her. It felt wrong to me too.
The obvious trap
Most app companies solve the storage question one way: lock it in house. You use our service, your files live in our infrastructure, you pay us a monthly subscription for the privilege. It's the classic SaaS play, and it makes sense from a business perspective. Recurring revenue. Lock-in. Control over the user experience. But I kept thinking about that photographer. And about the designer who'd complained during a beta call that she didn't want to manage 'yet another cloud account.' And the videographer who said he'd already spent years organising his projects in Dropbox and didn't fancy starting over. Creatr isn't meant to be a storage company. We're not in the business of running servers and managing infrastructure at scale. That's not our expertise, and honestly, there are companies already world-class at it. Google. Microsoft. Dropbox. Why would we try to out-build them? Why would we ask creatives to abandon systems that already work for them?The conversation that changed the roadmap
Around month four, our Studio tier was taking shape. We knew we wanted to offer something more powerful than the Free plan: unlimited projects, custom domains, download analytics, invoice payments through Stripe. But we didn't know what to do about storage. I sat down with a videographer and a photographer who'd both said they'd only move to Studio if it solved a real friction point. They both said the same thing independently: 'I need to keep my files where they already are.' One of them had a whole Dropbox structure with naming conventions her team had agreed on five years ago. Moving it felt impossible. That conversation shifted everything. We looked at the APIs from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive. They existed. They were mature. The technical lift wasn't insurmountable. And the user benefit was immediate: creatives could stay in their existing workflow, then use Creatr as the business layer on top. We built bring-your-own-storage into Studio. You authenticate once, and your files live exactly where they already are. We don't store them. We don't charge you for the privilege. You manage the folders. You keep the control.What this means in practice
When you're running a one-person design practice from your phone, every friction point matters. You can't afford to waste time fiddling with systems. You need to invoice a client, download analytics on who's viewed your work, and send them a delivery link. You don't need to upload 50 files to a new platform. Bring-your-own-storage is a small technical choice that signals something larger: we're not trying to replace your workflow. We're trying to live inside it. A designer in our Studio tier now connects their Google Drive, and Creatr pulls in their project folders as a read-only reference. They can still organise, move, and manage files in Google Drive the way they always have. Creatr handles the client-facing layer: the portfolio, the project delivery link, the invoice. For our Pro tier, we added iCloud Drive support as well, because we knew our iOS-first audience would want that option too. Same principle. Your files. Your control. We're just the layer that makes it work for your business.The decision we didn't make
I'm aware this decision costs us something. We could charge creatives for hosted storage. We could bundle it in. We could make it a friction point that nudges people toward higher tiers. Plenty of app companies do exactly that. But we'd rather be useful than extractive. A freelance illustrator who finds Creatr genuinely solves the invoicing and portfolio problem - even if they keep their files in Dropbox - is more likely to stay, recommend us, and upgrade to Pro when they're ready for the other features. Someone forced into our storage ecosystem and resentful about it? They'll leave the moment a better option appears. There's also something philosophically important about this choice. Creative work is personal. These are your intellectual property. Your relationship with storage should be your choice, not something we dictate as a condition of using our platform.What came next
The bring-your-own-storage launch taught us something about building for creatives: they don't want less control, they want more. They want tools that respect the systems they've already built. It also clarified what Creatr actually is. We're not a replacement for everything. We're a business operating system that sits alongside the tools creatives already use. Portfolio showcase. Project management. Invoicing. Client delivery links. Stripe payments. Those are the problems we solve. Your storage, your editing software, your calendar, your email - those stay where they are. Even now, months after launch, I get messages from creatives saying they switched to Creatr because they could finally use an app that didn't demand they uproot their entire digital life. That's the feedback that matters.What's one tool or system you've built up over the years that you'd never want an app to force you to abandon?