The prices we use are based on the costs plus a (small) margin so we can run a healthy business.
But most of our competitors just compete on price. We are a full service provider which means we have a good support record and take care of updating, bugs and app compatibility. Which takes more time then you would think. Our service has also been designed with Privacy in mind, which also means maintaining our own servers in a datacenter we trust (xs4all) and also shares our views on internet freedom. We choose to do so to have complete control over our infrastructure, although it might not be the most cost efficient approach. There are a lot of competitors who are just a front and offload the computing to a public cloud without any service.
The free version we are offering runs on the same platform and we think it’s good to have a privacy-friendly alternative sync and share option for free. But we don’t want to compete on price or amount of storage, but on the full service and privacy benefits. Although we don’t officially offer any support on the free plan, we still answer most emails, especially when there are technical glitches only we can fix.
We have been selected as the preferred supplier of the BeNeLux by Nextcloud GmbH which is mainly based on the experiences our customers have. But this takes a great deal of time and effort which also means that we are not the cheapest out there. If you are looking for the cheapest option, then there are more suitable ones out there. That being said, I don’t want to say anything bad about competitors you might want to check out the providers section on the Nextcloud forum before choosing a provider.