Blueground Replaces S3 Downloads and Email Attachments With Trackable Files.com Links

Blueground operates furnished apartments for stays of a month or longer. It leases homes from landlords, furnishes them, and rents them to relocating professionals, corporate clients, and travelers, managing each home on the landlord's behalf. The network spans more than 40,000 homes across Europe, North America, and Asia.

That model puts Blueground permanently between two parties who will never log in to its systems: the landlord who owns the apartment and the guest who lives in it. When an apartment is damaged, evidence has to travel to both. Before-and-after photos and video document a broken pipe or a damaged floor, substantiate a payment request to a landlord, and sometimes go to the guest as well. Every one of those exchanges crosses the boundary of Blueground's own platform.

Across four teams, that evidence moved through a manual S3-download-and-email routine that ended Blueground's visibility as soon as the attachment was sent. Files.com replaced it with logged links while S3 remained the system of record.

Every Damage Claim Started With a Download and an Email

The media lived in Amazon S3, and the only way to get it to an outside party was by hand. An employee opened the bucket, downloaded the photo or video, attached it to an email, and sent it. Admins, customer experience agents, support staff, and accountants all ran this same routine, over and over, across a portfolio of tens of thousands of homes.

The cost landed in two places. The first was time: a repetitive manual chore spread across four teams, sitting in the middle of every damage conversation. The second was worse. The moment a file left as an attachment, Blueground lost all sight of it. There was no record of whether the landlord ever opened the evidence behind a request for money.

“Users will go through, download this photo, upload it to their email as an attachment, and then share it, which takes time. We can't see the access and what happened.”

Landlords and Guests Were Never Going to Get Accounts

The obvious fixes were closed off. Landlords and guests worked entirely outside Blueground's admin tooling, and provisioning accounts for them was never on the table. Meanwhile, the media's system of record was S3, and Blueground needed a governed, trackable way to share files with outside parties. Solving the problem meant either building that delivery layer in-house or putting one over the existing buckets without moving the data.

That shaped the requirements. Blueground needed to deliver photos and video to recipients who hold no account and never will, keep a record of what happened to each file after it was sent, and leave S3 exactly where it was as the system of record. Blueground selected Files.com to be that layer over its existing storage.

Files.com Mounted Over the Buckets That Were Already There

Using Remote Server Mounts, Blueground connected its S3 buckets to Files.com as remote servers. The mounted folders are a real-time window onto the media in S3: nothing was migrated, nothing is stored twice, and the buckets remain the system of record. Files.com sits on top as the delivery and governance layer.

On top of the mounts, staff use Share Links to send damage evidence outward. A landlord or guest follows the link to a web page, previews the photos in the browser, and downloads the files, with no account and no software required. Each link carries an access log, so Blueground can see who opened the file.

Within months, Files.com was wired into progressively more of Blueground's storage estate, and share links spread into everyday team file sharing beyond the damage workflow that started it.

A Layer Over the Storage, Not a Migration Away From It

Today, a damage claim conversation opens differently. Where an accountant once pulled a video out of a bucket and hoped the attachment was seen, support and accounting now send a Files.com link and can check that it was opened. The evidence behind a request for money is finally on the record.

The larger point is what Blueground did not have to do. It did not migrate its media, retrain its teams on new storage, or build a delivery system in-house. Files.com went over the top of the storage Blueground already had, and the download-and-email workflow disappeared underneath it.