Elston Baretto's Tiiny Host: growing a free file-hosting tool into a subscription business

What Sharing a Single File Could Become

In March 2023, Elston Baretto announced that Tiiny Host had reached $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR). A tool for uploading and sharing HTML files or PDFs had grown into an income source that could replace a job. He had quit his job in late 2022, shortly before.

Baretto studied computer science in university and worked as a software engineer at JP Morgan from 2013 to 2017. He then tried to start a company but did not get the results he hoped for, returned to employment, and prepared a new product. From 2020 to 2022, while he was growing Tiiny Host, his employer was the academic publisher Elsevier, where he worked as a senior-level engineer.

Tiiny Host, which he started in 2019, began with the hassle of web hosting that he knew well. Publishing a file to the cloud was simple for people who knew the technology, but still hard for those encountering it for the first time. He narrowed the product down to something he could build alone within a month after work, and made a free single page where you drag and drop a ZIP file.

From a Free Tool to a Paid Plan

The instructions he published in February 2020 had only two steps. You compressed HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files into a ZIP, then typed the subdomain name you wanted and uploaded it. The initial scope was static websites, so users did not need to install a server program or learn deployment commands.

The convenience was refined after launch. The first version took 15 to 20 minutes before a site went public, but the next version cut that to a few seconds. He let people upload without signing up, and gave templates to visitors who had no file to try. Those templates became a main path for new visitors to experience the product.

The first 200 or so users came from Reddit and other early user communities. Baretto did not set a detailed development roadmap in advance; instead he watched what people uploaded and which features they asked for repeatedly. He prioritized features that many users wanted and that fit the goal of making web hosting simple.

The paid plan came out of those conversations too. About three months after the initial launch, he bundled the requested features into a Pro plan. According to a March 2020 retrospective, the first payment came from the 50 percent discount he offered at the Product Hunt launch, and the second customer paid full price. Once people actually paid after the free trial, the potential of the business became concrete.

The paid features included large ZIP uploads, connecting your own domain, and password-protecting a site. The pricing introduced in a November 2021 interview was $14 a month for Pro and $18 a month for Pro Plus, with a discount for annual payment. He had created a paid conversion point between people simply trying the tool out and customers who wanted to keep running their own content.

Growth Driven by Search Traffic and PDF Support

Understanding the customers changed where the product sat. Developers compared Tiiny Host with Netlify, Vercel, and GitHub Pages, but Baretto found that non-technical users who had never heard of those tools welcomed the product. They were people who wanted to publish a file they had made in the form they wanted while avoiding hosting setup. He adjusted the product's description and target audience to that demand.

Early growth was slow. Baretto recalled that for roughly the first 12 months, MRR did not even reach $100. During that time he tried promotion on Reddit, Slack, YouTube, Product Hunt, and blogs, looking for a path that brought users in consistently.

In 2020 he also tested a lifetime deal and made more than $1,000 in three days. The price he announced was $59, with limits on quantity and tiers. He explained that answering questions quickly in a related Facebook group reduced buyers' anxiety. That revenue was a one-time payment, and he said he planned to continue the business with higher-tier subscription features after the limited initial sale.

During this period Baretto deliberately changed how he split his time between development and marketing. In a 2021 interview he said he spent about 80 percent on marketing and the remaining 20 percent on improving the product based on feedback. He had previously developed an app for months without gathering users.

What created steady traffic was search engine optimization, or SEO. After getting advice from Saba, the founder of VEED, he made about five pages targeting specific queries such as "HTML file hosting." The pages he prepared in early 2020 saw no response for a while, then traffic grew sharply around November of that year, and in a March 2021 interview he said about 150 sites were being uploaded per day.

The second turning point was PDF. Seeing that some users converted PDFs to HTML before uploading, Baretto added direct PDF uploads. Development took about two days part-time, and it took about three months for the related pages to rank in search. He said this feature doubled the growth rate.

PDF support broadened what the service was used for. Restaurants could publish menus, real estate companies promotional materials, and designers portfolios on the web. Showing an already finished document on your own domain reduced the burden of building a separate website.

Going Full Time and Adjusting Pricing

MRR grew from $600 in March 2021 to around $5,000 by June 2022. When Baretto quit in late 2022, it was about $8,000. It was the point at which he judged that he could cover his living costs and needed to put more time into the business.

Until he quit, he said he did not withdraw the money the business earned for himself, but reinvested it, including in freelancers to handle content writing and web development. While his salary supported his life, he could put the product's revenue back into growth. The $10,000 MRR announced in March 2023 was subscription revenue that had gone through this process, and does not mean personal net profit.

Even then, account login used an email magic link instead of a password. There were requests for password login, but he did not raise their priority. Baretto explained that a product delivering the value customers need does not have to delay launch until it has every conventional feature.

In a 2024 follow-up interview he said PDF-related use accounted for about 40 percent of revenue. He also reworked the pricing structure, because the lowest paid tier of $18 a month did not suit someone who wanted to host a single link. After he added a Lite plan between free and the paid tiers, the number of paid conversions doubled, and some users upgraded to a higher tier right after joining Lite.

The free policy changed as well. After switching from a seven-day trial to a structure where free use continues indefinitely, traffic tripled, he said. The Tiiny Host banner attached to free sites became a channel that brought in new visitors every time a user shared their link.

Operating Burden and Later Results

Wider free use also increased the operational burden of handling abuse. Baretto said the AWS account that hosted the entire infrastructure nearly got suspended because of malicious users. If some harmful links spread widely, the service's domain could end up on a blocklist, so monitoring and removing content became a core task for keeping the business running.

A way of dividing the work became necessary too. Baretto used operations support staff and outsourced marketing, development, and design help, and set up a process to publish two blog posts a week by sharing keyword research and writing. It was a change meant to turn customer acquisition methods he had validated himself into repeatable work.

In a Ramen Club interview published in May 2025, Tiiny Host was described as having grown past $400,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). The business of a solo founder who started without outside investment had expanded into a small team sharing development and customer support. Baretto explained that having a team reduced the burden of having to handle every problem himself.

What stands out in Tiiny Host's growth is that he did not stay with the customer he had first imagined. Starting from a tool for developers, he discovered demand from non-technical users and broadened the business by finding features and search terms suited to them. Looking at this process, the competitiveness of a small hosting tool came down to how well it understood people who wanted to publish a file simply.