As we were asked by the Nextcloud company to be one of the partners in offering free hosted Nextcloud, it took some discussion as this is opposed to the initial idea of having a clear and open business model. We wanted to be transparent about how we earn our money: You pay us, we offer you a service for it. We focus on privacy and on operating as a full-service provider. We maintain, support and update your service, that’s what you pay for.
Free hosting is offered by a lot of companies to earn money by scanning through your content for customized advertising. By offering a free hosting service, we would give up this clear and open business model. At the end we decided to offer a free hosting anyway to offer a privacy friendly free hosting service. We see it as our way of giving something back to the world, as well as a trial version for potential consumer or business users.
There are some distinct differences between our paid subscriptions and the free accounts:
- Free accounts reside on a shared server, as a paid subscription gives you a server on your own.
- Free accounts have limited storage to 2GB.
- There’s limited access to usage of Nextcloud apps for the free accounts. For the individual packages (not the free accounts) you can send a request to our support team. There are some apps that allow too much access to our hosting environment, so that’s why we won’t allow you to install apps yourself. However, if you send a request to our support team, we check the apps for known issues and if there are no problems found, we can add the apps you would like.
- A paid subscription offers you the option to add Collabora or OnlyOffice, which allows for 20 concurrent document edits at the same time. As this is a separate server, this is a paid option.
- A paid subscription enables you to share files/folders without a mandatory password and expiry date. As a result of abuse, all shares made from free accounts need a password and expire after 1 week. This means you must reshare every week if necessary.
- With a paid subscription you’re entitled to share your Nextcloud storage with 4 users. We only allow the creation of users in our business packages. But our support team can add a user to your instance, send a request by email (or use the contact form on our website).
- With a paid subscription you can up- or downgrade your storage if needed. Our procedure is we calculate the difference in cost between the current and the desired subscription and adjust the end date of the current subscription to match the cost. You can send a request by email (or use the contact form on our website).