Ge.tt

» see ge.tt as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Ge.tt's whole pitch fit in one sentence: the upload began when you chose the file, not when you pressed send. By the time you had finished typing in who it was for, the transfer was already most of the way done, and the link worked while the bytes were still moving. In 2010 that felt different from everything else in the category.

Two computer science students at Aarhus University, Tobias Baunbaek and Mathias Buus Madsen, built it and launched out of Copenhagen in November 2010. Free accounts got 2 GB and people who never registered got 250 MB, with paid tiers running from 5 euros a month up to 20. A year in they had 425,000 users and a 6,700 euro prize from the Danish Venture Cup.

It ran for ten more years and then stopped on 28 February 2021. The last counter on the homepage read 53.3 million files from 6.9 million users. On 10 March the remaining data was deleted, though some servers had already gone dark on or before 4 March, which is the detail that tells you how orderly the shutdown was.

File hosts were a category I paid close attention to, but the years that mattered to me were earlier, when the question was which host would pass a 700 MB file and how many minutes of waiting that cost. By 2010 I was out of university and working. The thing Ge.tt did well, moving one file to one person in a hurry, was not the thing I had needed a file host for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the atomico money ~

In December 2011 Atomico, the fund Niklas Zennstrom started after Skype, put 350,000 euros into the company across a small seed and a follow-on. The team it funded was five people: four developers including both founders, plus one designer.

That is the whole investment history anyone wrote down. There is no Series A after it and no acquisition. For a company that moved 53 million files, Ge.tt left a thin paper trail, and the most detailed account of its last week is an Archive Team wiki page written by the people trying to save the contents.

~ the ten days after ~

The gap between the shutdown and the deletion was ten days, and Archive Team spent it running a grab. The result is partial, and the reason is structural: Ge.tt handed out short random URLs and published no index to crawl, so what got saved is whatever somebody had linked to somewhere a crawler could reach.

Ten days is more notice than most file hosts give, and it is still not enough to pull 53 million files over a public connection. What exists now is one Internet Archive item, filed under a timestamp from April 2021, a month after the data it describes stopped existing.

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