Work started on this the 20241114 in Madrid
Google Drive's costs ads up quickly as your users grow
You start with workspace basic, 6 USD a month per user. Gives you basic functionality and 30gb per user pooled. That works for a while, maybe a year or two.
Then you notice that your product images, videos etc. are filling up
those 30gb per user super fast! You look at the next step up. That costs
you another 8 USD a month for a total of 14 USD a month per user. Get
yourself 7 users and you are seeing an invoice of over 1K USD a year!
That escalated quickly.
That is where NextCloud comes in. Not the paranoid, self hosted, I have too much time on my hands kind of NextCloud. I wish it was not the case that running your instance was time consuming but experience plus most user's experience on the internet show that it is the case. The hosted Nextcloud that gives you 1Tb of storage and infinite users for 6 USD a month!
The Storage Share kind of Nextcloud. It took me nearly 20 hours of searching and googling to stumble on this solution. I found it by looking for SMTP storage solutions - rsync.net or Hetzner's own Storage Box.
This solution is a small entrepreneur's dream!
If I hadn't started with google I would have already changed out my
email provider to someone like Forward Email
which gives you unlimited accounts for 9 USD a month.
I'm sad to know that it was so hard to find this solution and I want to
do at least the small gesture of writing about it to help maybe one
small business save thousands a year by using this solution.
Quick update after 1 month of trying this out
It's impressive how much this can do. We now use this for our chats and
calls. You have more advanced features than on Google Drive: share with
password, limit your
shares
to a certain date, create file drop
folders,
transcribe voice chat messages
locally,
excellent scanning capabilities for documents and many more.
Of course it's not without drawbacks, the UI is not as easy to use as
Google's and the online file collaboration is not as powerful as sheets
and docs from google. For live collaboration on documents, we are still
using Google Drive. For now.