Your SaaS File Uploads Are Slower Than They Need to Be

Here's a question most developers never think to ask: when a user uploads a file in your app, where does that file actually go first? If you're using any standard SDK setup - multer in Express, Django's request.FILES, Rails's ActionDispatch - the answer is: through your server. The file lands on your server, sits in memory or a temp directory, and then your server streams it up to S3 or R2 or whatever storage backend you're using. That flow looks like this: User → Your Server → Cloud Storage And it causes three problems that most SaaS developers quietly accept as normal: 1. Latency doubles. The file has to travel to your server and then from your server to storage. Two hops instead of one. For a 10MB file, that's noticeable. For a 100MB file, it's painful. 2. You pay for bandwidth you didn't need to use. Every byte that passes through your server costs you compute time and egress fees, depending on your hosting setup. You're essentially paying to be a middleman. 3. Your server becomes