Your WeTransfer link isn't broken — it's expired, by design

A buyer from three weeks ago messages you: the link doesn't work. You check it yourself and it loads fine. This is the one case on this site where that isn't a signing-in-as-the-owner problem — it's that the two of you are checking it on opposite sides of an expiry date, and the date was set the day you made the transfer, not the day it stopped working for them.

The expiry isn't a setting you can leave off

WeTransfer's own page on it is direct: "Free and Starter accounts are capped at 3 days." Not a default you can change to "never" — a hard cap. The same page says that only goes away on "Ultimate and above", where "you can pick any duration from a single day to never". A free WeTransfer link is, by design, a three-day link.

What our own access check can and can't tell you

AccessDrop's weekly check works by requesting the link and reading what comes back — a login redirect, a 403, a 404. We tested what an expired WeTransfer transfer actually returns, using a made-up, clearly-dead transfer ID, and it comes back as an ordinary HTTP 200. WeTransfer's "this transfer has expired" message is rendered by the page in your browser, not sent as an error status by the server, so the status code alone can't distinguish a live transfer from an expired one.

As of 4 October 2026 the check knows this about WeTransfer's long-form download page specifically, and shows it honestly rather than guessing: a neutral "Can't be verified from outside" pill, not the green one, and not a false "broken" either. It still can't open the page the way a buyer's browser does, so it can't tell you whether a given link has actually expired — only that it can't rule it out. (The short `we.tl/t-…` form is unaffected: an invented one correctly 404s, so a dead short link still shows as broken.)

What to actually do

1. 1

   Don't use a free WeTransfer link as the product itself

   It's a genuinely good tool for sending someone a file once. It's the wrong tool for something you're selling to be downloaded for months, because the expiry isn't a bug you can avoid — it's the product working as intended.

2. 2

   Move the file somewhere permission-based instead

   Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Canva don't expire on a timer — they fail (when they do) on a permission you can actually check and fix. See the guide for whichever one you use: Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive.

3. 3

   If you must keep using WeTransfer, pay for a plan with no expiry

   WeTransfer's own page states "Ultimate and above" can be set to never expire. That removes the specific problem this page is about — it doesn't change what our own check can see, above.

4. 4

   Re-send, don't just apologise

   An expired link can't be revived. If a buyer tells you theirs has stopped working, the fix is a new transfer and a new link, every time, for every buyer who's past the three days — which is the real cost of using a link built to expire.

Mega is the other host with a non-obvious limit like this one — not a clock, but a bandwidth quota shared by whoever else happens to be downloading from the same IP address. See the Mega guide if that's the one you're using instead.

The structural fix is the same one every other guide on this site reaches for: put a link you control in front of the actual file host, so the thing printed on your product never has to change even when the destination does. How to deliver digital downloads on Etsy covers the general shape of this.

AccessDrop takes a Drive, Dropbox, Canva or OneDrive link and turns it into a branded delivery PDF with a QR code and a short link you can repoint later, checking weekly that the destination still answers. £19 for a year, one payment, up to 5 deliverables — it doesn't host your files, and for WeTransfer's long-form links specifically, as explained above, the weekly check can tell you it can't verify the page, but not whether a given transfer has actually expired. Use it to point at a permission-based host, not a timed one.