Three questions and answers: who will (not) have to pay for Nextcloud in the future

There has been a rude awakening for some Nextcloud users lately: push notifications suddenly no longer displayed their own instances correctly, a limit struck when there were too many users. Should the only way out here be a paid enterprise license? And wouldn’t such a dependency be in stark contrast to the open source principle of free cloud software? We spoke to Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek about the background and who actually has to deal with the commercial licenses.

Why should certain users pay more in the future just because they want to receive push notifications?

‘Pay more’ is not correct, since Nextcloud is free in 99.9 percent of all cases. I founded Nextcloud to put people back in control of their data. Data protection, privacy, security and the decentralization of the Internet are the goals here. And to make that as easy as possible, Nextcloud is open source software and available for free. Even for small organizations and companies, we don’t want to create any hurdles to use Nextcloud. And by small businesses, we mean businesses with hundreds of users. So private users, small businesses and schools don’t have to pay anything to use Nextcloud – in contrast to most other solutions.

But of course we have to pay our team, our servers and so on. That’s why we decided to focus on offering services to large organizations, governments and corporations. This includes the push notifications and other services like our app store, download server, security help, scaling, support and so on. The business model here is similar to that of Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, MariaDB and others. And just like these products, Nextcloud will always remain free 99.9 percent of the time. So for example for home users and small companies and organizations.

So that all this works in the long term and sustainably, we offer it in one package: Nextcloud Enterprise, which is offered as a subscription.

Of course, we understand that some large companies would rather have everything for free. In particular, services that we operate free of charge for the community and our customers cannot be made available to all organizations free of charge. We ourselves have high costs for the constant further development, the servers and the operation of these services, which we have to cover. And of course these companies know that too. Our model is fair and sustainable, and we remain committed to the open source philosophy and our community.

Now, not all Nextcloud adopters are large companies with many users. What about schools and clubs, for example?

Of course, we know that sometimes larger organizations with over 1000 users who don’t have a big budget also want to use Nextcloud. For education we have a special offer, as do companies like SAP and Microsoft and others – something that works for most universities, schools and so on.

Most NGOs are of course small, but we offer significant discounts depending on the situation for NGOs to use Nextcloud.

And in many cases we offer Nextcloud Enterprise completely free of charge – it simply depends on what the school, university or NGO can afford and what is appropriate. At this point, we value fair and transparent dealings, on an equal footing with all partners. Of course, Nextcloud itself will always remain completely open source and free of charge for small and medium-sized organizations.

Back to the limitations: Can users set up the service operated by Nextcloud free of charge themselves?

Of course, a large company can also do what we offer itself. You then need appropriate engineers who can understand and maintain the software, fix problems and add functions. You also need infrastructure for a push proxy, the corresponding developer certificates from Google and Apple, update server, app store and the rest of the infrastructure. Most are open source on our GitHub, like the App Store respectively, not complicated to build. Some services we source and provide through partners, like our Microsoft integration, are not open source, but Microsoft products are not open source either, so we assume that’s not an issue.

I think it’s better for any business to focus on their actual core competencies and leave the maintenance of Nextcloud and its services to us – because that’s what we do best. This creates a win-win situation for both sides.

Mr. KarlitschekThank you for the answers! All information about the new Nextcloud Hub 4 can be found in the release message and in the test of the new version.

In the “Three Questions and Answers” series, iX wants to get to the heart of today’s IT challenges – whether it’s the user’s point of view in front of the PC, the manager’s point of view or the everyday life of an administrator. Do you have suggestions from your daily practice or that of your users? Whose tips on which topic would you like to read in a nutshell? Then please write to us or leave a comment in the forum.

(fo)