Salesforce file storage is convenient right up until the invoice arrives. At $5 per GB per month, storage costs that seemed trivial at launch become a real line item as an org matures — and there's still no native path to move files between orgs during a merger or migration without custom scripting.
S3 File Manager connects Salesforce directly to Amazon S3, giving admins the same in-record file experience at a fraction of the cost, plus a real toolkit for org-to-org file migration at scale.
The Problem: The Economics and Mechanics Break Down
- Salesforce charges $5/GB/month ($60/GB annually) for file storage; AWS S3 costs $0.023/GB/month — a 200× price gap for the same bytes.
- There is no native mechanism to migrate files between two Salesforce orgs during a merger, divestiture, or platform migration.
- Large migrations — 100,000+ files — routinely get stuck, fail silently, or require bespoke development to complete.
- Files over 50 MB run into Salesforce's governor limits, making them awkward to handle through standard tooling.
- Long-running migrations have no pause/resume support natively — close the browser, and you're starting over.
The User Journey: Cutting Costs and Moving Files Without Disruption
Follow the finance and IT teams through a decision to stop overpaying for storage — and, separately, through a company merger that requires moving everything to a new home.
| Stage | What happens | Who | Experience |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Decision | Finance flags rising storage costs | Finance | 2 — Painful |
| IT proposes a cheaper storage home for files | IT | 4 — Smooth | |
| Business approves the switch | Leadership | 4 — Smooth | |
| The Move | Files move to their new, lower-cost home | IT | 5 — Effortless |
| Employees keep working, files still open from the same place | Employee | 5 — Effortless | |
| Large batches move overnight without anyone watching | IT | 5 — Effortless | |
| A Company Merger | Two businesses need one combined set of records | Leadership | 3 — Some friction |
| Files move from the old company into the new one automatically | IT | 5 — Effortless | |
| Every file lands attached to the right customer, deal, or case | IT | 5 — Effortless | |
| Work pauses for the weekend and resumes Monday with nothing lost | IT | 5 — Effortless |
Experience rating: 5 = effortless, 1 = blocked.
Nothing about the day-to-day changes for employees — a file still opens from the same place it always has. What changes happens behind the scenes: the business's file bill drops sharply, a full company merger's worth of files can move without a small army of people manually re-attaching things to the right customer record, and if the move needs to pause overnight or over a weekend, it simply picks up again exactly where it left off.
Key Capabilities & Business Outcome
Beyond the core migration engine, the toolkit includes a Background Batch Mode for files under 4MB (start it and close the browser — you'll get an email when it's done), Wrong-Org protection during import to prevent files landing in the wrong destination, and a Retry All Failures button so a handful of errors never means re-running an entire batch.
The headline number is the cost delta: 95–99% storage cost reduction, verified directly against published Salesforce and AWS pricing — a 200× differential that compounds every month an org keeps growing its file volume. On top of that, org-to-org migrations that used to require custom development now run through a guided UI with pause/resume and 100% version history preservation, turning what was previously a project into a repeatable operation.
See it move files at scale: S3 File Manager walkthrough or reach out to consulting@raptbot.com.