# Five minutes. Git LFS took 66. Perforce took 83.

That is the first push of Unreal Engine 5.8, and the engine behind the short bar is Epic's Lore. Until today there was nowhere to host it but your own servers. We ran the first managed Lore hosting as an alpha through August and September. From October 1, it is open to everyone.

Interlinked Files, 2026-10-01. Canonical: https://www.interlinkedfiles.com/research/first-managed-lore-hosting

## TL;DR

- Interlinked Files is managed hosting for Lore, Epic's open source (MIT) version control engine for big files. Hosting is the only thing we charge for.
- Alpha from August 13, 2026, through September. Open to everyone October 1, with `@interlinked/cli` on npm and Bun.
- In Anchorpoint's benchmark, Lore pushed Unreal Engine 5.8 (63.5 GB) in 5m 16s against 1h 6m for Git LFS and 1h 23m for Perforce, and stored it in 22 GB against 57 GB for Git.
- On October 1, Diversion's managed Lore hosting is a waitlist, Anchorpoint's is planned, and Epic leaves hosting to you.
- $5.99 per 100GB of storage or transfer, no seats: $113.81 a month for 20 people on a terabyte. Free with a confirmed email: 2 projects, 30GB, 100GB of transfer a month.
- Dedup reaches across your organization, so a second Unreal project uploads only what is new.

## First push of Unreal Engine 5.8 source · 392,559 files · 63.5 GB

| Time to first push (lower is better) | |
|---|---|
| Lore | 5m 16s |
| Git LFS | 1h 6m |
| Perforce | 1h 23m |

Measured by Anchorpoint on a self-hosted server: AWS EC2 c6i.2xlarge, eu-central-1, EBS storage, 32 ms latency. Lore 0.8.3, Perforce 2026.1, Git 2.54 with LFS 3.7.1. Source: Anchorpoint, "Comparing Lore vs Git and Perforce", June 26, 2026, https://www.anchorpoint.app/blog/comparing-lore-vs-git-and-perforce

An hour and six minutes for Git LFS. An hour and twenty-three for Perforce. **Five minutes and sixteen seconds for Lore.** Same project, same cloud setup, same network: all of Unreal Engine 5.8, 392,559 files and 63.5 GB, pushed for the first time.

Those are Anchorpoint's numbers, published in June. The engine behind the short bar is **Lore**, the version control Epic Games built into Unreal Editor for Fortnite and open sourced under the MIT license this year. Most big-file teams still choose between a 1995 architecture and Git with large files bolted on. Lore is Epic's answer.

There was one catch. Epic ships the engine, not a service. If you wanted Lore, you ran the server, its database and its storage yourself.

We have hosted it since **August 13, 2026**. Through August and September it ran as an alpha. **Today, October 1, Interlinked opens managed Lore hosting to everyone**: sign up, push a project, send a link. $5.99 per 100GB, no seats, any industry.

## Every place a Lore project can live, as of this morning

Four companies offer Lore in some form. One lets you sign up and push today. The last two columns are what most teams use now.

| | Interlinked Files | Diversion | Anchorpoint | Epic Games | Perforce | Git LFS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Engine | Lore | Lore | Lore | Lore (theirs) | Perforce, 1995 | Git + LFS, 2015 |
| Hosted, open to anyone today | Yes | Waitlist | "More on that soon" | No, run it yourself | Yes | Yes |
| Hosting Lore projects since | Aug 13, 2026 | Not yet | Not yet | Never offered | Not Lore | Not Lore |
| Published price | $5.99 per 100GB | On request | None | Your AWS bill | $39 per user a month + storage | $0.07/GiB stored + $0.0875/GiB out |
| Charged per person | No | Not published | Not published | No | Yes | No |
| 20 people, 1 TB, a month | $113.81 | Not published | Not published | Your AWS bill | $780 + overage | $145.11 |

## First in, and still the only one open

Our alpha took its first hosted save on August 13. When Anchorpoint shipped its free Lore desktop client on September 21, for servers you run yourself, that alpha was **39 days old**. Anchorpoint says managed hosting is coming: "More on that soon." Diversion runs a waitlist for managed Lore hosting and sends pricing after you sign up. Epic's documentation covers running Lore on your own machine or in your own AWS account.

As of today our Lore hosting is **49 days old**, and open to anyone with a confirmed email address.

- **2026-08-07.** We start building on Lore.
- **2026-08-13.** Alpha: the first save lands in our hosted Lore vault, its storage in Cloudflare R2.
- **2026-08-29.** Every Interlinked link becomes a Lore project, with full history from its first save.
- **2026-09-21.** Anchorpoint ships a Lore desktop client for servers you run yourself.
- **2026-09-24.** We start rebuilding the vault on Cloudflare's edge.
- **2026-10-01.** Open to everyone.

## Why the bar is so short: Lore only stores what changed

Git keeps each version of a file whole, and Git LFS moves big files to a second server where each version is still whole. Lore cuts every file into content-addressed chunks, and a version is a list of them. Change a megabyte inside a gigabyte asset and the next save costs about a megabyte. A chunk that appears twice is stored once.

Epic's own FAQ puts it plainly: in Git, "large files require bolted-on LFS rather than first-class chunked storage." The same benchmark shows what that does to the server's disk and to a fresh clone.

| Stored on the server, from 63.5 GB | |
|---|---|
| Lore | 22 GB |
| Perforce | 32 GB |
| Git | 57 GB |

| Fresh clone | |
|---|---|
| Lore | 20m 21s |
| Perforce | 23m 36s |
| Git LFS | 29m 21s |

## The engine is the easy part. Running it in the cloud is not.

Anchorpoint's headline numbers came from a Lore server on block storage. When they pointed the same engine at cloud object storage, the commit step went from 303 seconds to 529, and it only got there after AWS parameter tuning, a warm-up pass and a caching layer. Their verdict on that setup:

> "This is a requirement, not a tuning knob." (Anchorpoint, on running Lore over cloud object storage, June 2026)

That is the job we took on. Lore's server expects its database and its storage a millisecond away, in one data centre. A hosted service has to answer teams spread across continents. So we kept the engine exactly as Epic wrote it and rebuilt everything around it.

Kept exactly as Epic wrote it:

- The `.lore` project format on your disk
- FastCDC chunking
- BLAKE3 hashing
- zstd compression

Rebuilt for hosting:

- The vault runs on Cloudflare Workers beside the bytes in R2, not on one server in one region
- Chunks travel and rest in packs, so a terabyte is a few hundred thousand objects, not millions
- Each project's versions and latest saves are written ready at push time, so checking for changes is one read
- Content that never changes is served from Cloudflare's cache, near whoever downloads it

## Your second Unreal project uploads only what is new

Studios carry the same engine, plugins and marketplace packs into project after project. On Interlinked, dedup reaches across your whole organization: when you push a new project, every chunk the organization already holds is recorded against it instead of uploaded again.

Nothing leaks. A chunk is matched only against projects your own access can open, and never across organizations.

## The bill is bytes, not people

Twenty people, one terabyte stored and one terabyte downloaded in a month, at each company's published list price:

| 20 people, 1 TB stored, 1 TB downloaded, one month | |
|---|---|
| Interlinked | $113.81 |
| Git LFS on GitHub | $145.11 |
| Unity Version Control | $226.50 |
| Diversion Indie | $400 |
| Perforce P4 Cloud | $780 + overage |

Each company's published list price. Diversion's plans are for its own engine; its Lore hosting has no public price. Perforce's figure is seats alone: it does not publish its storage and egress overage rates.

One number covers storage and transfer alike: **$5.99 per 100GB**, which is $59.90 per terabyte, with unlimited people reading and writing. The desktop app, whole-machine search and the `ifile` CLI are free on every machine you own.

| | Free (confirmed email) | $5.99 a month |
|---|---|---|
| Hosted projects | 2 | unlimited |
| Storage | 30GB | 100GB, then $5.99 per further 100GB |
| Transfer a month, up and down | 100GB | 100GB, then $5.99 per further 100GB |
| Writers and readers | unlimited | unlimited |
| Removed when nobody touches it | after 12 idle months, two warnings first | never |

## From a folder to a link in four commands

```
npm install -g @interlinked/cli
ifile auth create
ifile auth verify
ifile push ./MyUnrealProject
```

(`bun add -g @interlinked/cli` installs the same package.)

`ifile push` prints the link. A teammate runs `ifile clone <link>`, or opens the link in a browser with nothing installed. The desktop app does the same with a button, because it calls the same commands. Git's words work as they are: `commit`, `log`, `branch`, `clone`.

## The fine print

**We are hosted only.** If your files may not leave your building, run Epic's Lore on your own servers.

**Push with Interlinked, not with Epic's `lore` command.** Our vault speaks HTTPS through Cloudflare rather than Lore's own network protocol. The project folder on your disk stays in Lore's format either way.

**UEFN islands cannot come across yet.** Lore inside UEFN compresses with Oodle and open source Lore uses Zstandard, so open source Lore, ours included, cannot open a UEFN project today.

**The benchmark is Lore's, not ours.** Anchorpoint measured a self-hosted Lore 0.8.3 server and says its results may vary. We quote it for what the engine does.

## FAQ

### Who offers managed Lore hosting?

Interlinked Files, open to everyone since October 1, 2026, after an alpha that ran from August 13. On October 1, Diversion's managed Lore hosting is a waitlist with pricing on request, and Anchorpoint says managed hosting is coming.

### Was Interlinked the first to host Lore?

Yes. Our hosted Lore vault took its first save on August 13, 2026, 39 days before Anchorpoint released its Lore client for self-hosted servers, and it opened to everyone on October 1 while the other announced offers were still a waitlist and a plan.

### How fast is Lore compared to Git LFS and Perforce?

In Anchorpoint's June 2026 benchmark on Unreal Engine 5.8 (63.5 GB, 392,559 files), Lore's first push took 5m 16s against 1h 6m for Git LFS and 1h 23m for Perforce, a fresh clone took 20m 21s against 29m 21s and 23m 36s, and Lore stored the project in 22 GB against 57 GB for Git and 32 GB for Perforce. It measured a self-hosted Lore server, not our service.

### How much does Lore hosting cost on Interlinked?

Free with a confirmed email address: 2 projects, 30GB of storage and 100GB of transfer a month. Paid is $5.99 a month for unlimited projects with 100GB of storage and 100GB of transfer, then $5.99 per further 100GB of either. No per-seat charge: 20 people on a terabyte stored and downloaded is $113.81 a month.

### Is Interlinked only for game studios?

No. Any folder of big files: Unreal and Unity projects, VFX and animation, video, CAD and architecture. Lore does not care what the bytes are.

### Does dedup work across projects?

Across the projects in your organization that you can open. Pushing a second project uploads only the chunks the organization does not already hold. It never matches against another organization's data.

### Can I use Epic's lore command with Interlinked?

No. Push and pull with the Interlinked desktop app or the ifile CLI. Our vault speaks HTTPS through Cloudflare, not Lore's own network protocol, and the project folder on your disk stays in Lore's own format.

### Can I host a UEFN island?

Not yet. Lore inside UEFN compresses with Oodle and open source Lore uses Zstandard, so open source Lore, ours included, cannot open a UEFN project today.

### Is Lore ready for production?

Epic calls it a pre-stable 0.x release, and it is the built-in version control in Unreal Editor for Fortnite. We ship our own build of Lore and track Epic's releases.

## Links

- Download the app: https://www.interlinkedfiles.com/download
- Pricing: https://www.interlinkedfiles.com/pricing
- Perforce vs Diversion vs Git LFS, the arithmetic: https://www.interlinkedfiles.com/research/perforce-vs-diversion-vs-git-lfs-pricing
- Lore vs Git, thirteen measured differences: https://www.interlinkedfiles.com/lore-vs-git
- Status, probed every five minutes from outside Cloudflare: https://www.interlinkedfiles.com/status
- For agents: https://www.interlinkedfiles.com/llms.txt

Sources: Epic's Lore FAQ (epicgames.github.io/lore/faq); Anchorpoint, "Comparing Lore vs Git and Perforce" (June 26, 2026) and "Releasing Anchorpoint for Lore" (September 21, 2026); Diversion, "Managed Lore Hosting" (diversion.dev/lore-hosting); Perforce and GitHub pricing pages. Competitor pages read 2026-10-01.