Infrastructure upgrade and new pricing

In the coming months, we’ll be upgrading our infrastructure to a lot more powerful one, for the one interested, we’ll use kubernetes, and here is more on how we plan to roll it out.

If you are a developer, we plan to give you access to the raw infrastructure, meaning we’ll provide you an heroku like experience. You’ll be able to buy a setup package (10 hours x 50€/hour) where we’ll help you to setup the continuous deployment pipeline, from our Gitlab to our cluster.
We think it is really nice to provide a free software alternative to AWS, google cloud or heroku, and we hope our developer friends will like it.

We’ll have 2 clusters:

  • standard
  • premium

The standard cluster will have our current quality of service (qos):

  • ~ 2h downtime / month
  • spinning disks

The premium cluster will have an enhanced qos:

  • no downtime (well, except unforeseen reasons)
  • NVMe or spinning disk

The pricing for the standard cluster will be simple:

  • 4€/month/cpu
  • 2€/month/GB RAM
  • 0.05€/month/GB for spinning disk

The pricing for premium is the double of standard and:

  • 0.2€/month/GB of NVMe

In this infra, we would take care of:

  • TLS termination
  • backups
  • restore if needed (manual procedure, we’ll give one for free per month, and if you want more, we’ll bill you)
  • security (of the underlying infra, not the application)
  • monitoring (of the underlying infra, not the application)

We can also install managed application, like log collection (elastic) and monitoring (prometheus) solution for your application.

If you are not developer and just interested in having free software as a service, we’ll continue and enhance this service too. We can install and manage for you any of:
https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/tree/master/stable
https://github.com/operator-framework/awesome-operators

(and all the one we currently offer, we’ll add them to these lists)

For managed application, we also monitor them, and upgrade them.
The pricing for managed application is 2 times the above pricing.

For the end user, we’ll create packages and abstract the complexity.
(For instance for rocket chat, the price would be 28€/month if you have less than 100 simultaneous users)

And finally, to show our gratitude to our historic users, if you want, you can keep your current pricing, but it would help us if you could upgrade to the new one.
This would help us as we don’t pay ourself a decent salary yet, and also to decrease complexity of managing a lot of different plans.
All the users will be automatically upgraded to the new pricing for the next bill, but you can already contact us to keep the old pricing, we’ll be happy to do you this favor.

If you have any doubts, concerns, questions, please post here, or by email to contact@indie.host, or come to chat with us.

If you want beta access to the standard cluster, we’ll start it this week. We’ll send an email to everybody with more details about this pricing upgrade.

1 « J'aime »

will there be also an offer for the « standard user » (not a developer) to have increased performance of the cloud and less downtime for more money than the standard personal bundle? (also maybe with the option of having more than one email adress). I’d love that!

I’m not sure if I understand everything: will the bundle prices change? I.e. the ones advertised on indie.host: basic, personal, organisation.

@stragu @rainerzufall

Ok so to recap and actually this post needs to be updated and its not totally fixed, there is still a bit of ongoing thinking .

Kubernetes as a Service
That is what this post was mainly referring to.
Use our cluster to deploy your stuff, pay per ram/cpu/gbs
Still quite some work there.

Organisation Bundles

Get your own instance, we will define size based on number of users. I guess, again ongoing thinking here :wink: , starting price will be about 15e/month for a small instance which works out well for 5 people.

We focus our work on getting close to a goolge apps experience. At one point you will be able to deploy any apps in our catalog yourself through some kind of UI - thats the beauty of kubernetes. Pay click boom. Or maybe click boom pay :slight_smile: - get a demo for x days.

Freedom Bundles

There will be only one kind of bundle - Freedom Bundle - for 4e/month with 5GB with domain name being an extra option.

With that bundle you get access to all our shared instances:

  • wekan - wekan has been causing a bit of issues lately, maybe deck could be a replacement if it is becoming critical
  • mail - how many? how much for extra? still an open question. We have been very flexible on this so far
  • mastodon
  • rainloop
  • rocket.chat
  • ethercal
  • etherpad (we might close thise on in favor of CodiMD)
  • codimd
  • static site
  • keycloak for single login and SSO

Price for extra GBs will be 0.05€/month/GB

We focus our work on improving the user experience. There will be one entry point, keycloak. Register there and get access to all the apps probably with some kind of dashboard to get a view of the whole.

Demo Acconts
We are also thinking about changing the « demo accounts ». So today you get a demo account with 50MB on nextcloud. We want to change this to a 30 days free access to test the whole ecosystem of apps. That will also enable us to clean a bit the demo accounts we have been piling up so far.
So first register, then pay in 30 days or now if you want :slight_smile:


I’m very curious to get your thoughts on that as it is quite a change for the basic account but it offers a more complete ecosystem of apps that you can access through a single account.


Performances - Standard and Premium offers

Now @rainerzufall as regard your remarks on performances. Initially we thought about having two offers, standard and premium and same for the cloud. Standard being spinning disks and premium NVMe which would double the price. I’m not sure we have enough demand for that.

First I would like to check a bit how performances goes now on the standard kubernetes cluster as performances were indeed degrading on our old server, now it should be better - still have a bit of tuning on php to do, fix the nextcloud cron job and do some cleaning to with the demo accounts before being fully satisfied.

If performances become a blocking point offering a premium offer for a shared cloud can be something we can work out by running the database on NVMe disks. I would be interesting in knowing how much you would value a top of the art nextcloud instance.


So far in wanting to be accessible to all we have been offering a very low cost offer with standard performances. The freedom bundles have not been and we are not planning it to be our main source of income. Still we would like to change that a bit without loosing our accessibility and flexibility. That’s where we are getting towards with those new offers, having a more premium offer but still I think very accessible.

3 « J'aime »

Thanks a lot for taking the time to sketch out your plans! Very exciting. As I am on a business trip right now, I will come back to you with some more thoughts/feedback.

1 « J'aime »

All this sounds really good.
Do you have scheduled the next steps ? When can we hope to see the sso in actioin ? This point is a real killer feature for me.

Sorry, for my late reply! I have been incredible busy…

Again, I want to express my excitement about your plans! I have been searching for a hosting provider for quite some time. I am happy, that I found you and I hope you will find a way to work out your transitional problems to the new system.

When thinking about my wishes I realised how difficult it is to estimate a/my price-point without more knowledge on how much faster NVMe is compared to spinning disks. But nevertheless I tried it:

Currently I pay 48€/year for:

  • the Nextcloud bundle (incl. 15 GB storage) + email hosting (1 address)
  • current quality of service: ~ 2h downtime / month; spinning disks

The new pricing as far as I understand will be again 48€ per year for the standard bundle user.

What I personally would like to have is:

  • premium performance - improved speed and latency
  • much less downtime
  • 2 email addresses
  • around 10GB cloud storage

I would be willing to pay double for the above mentioned wish list.


additional/unrelated questions:

  • the organizational bundle will still be spinning disk?
  • how difficult is it to switch from a personal to a organisational bundle in the future?