TL;DR: We are raising prices significantly across our Managed Hosting packages. A dedicated follow-up post with exact numbers and discount details is coming in a few days. Add-On services are not affected for a while. The cost of running servers, mainly RAM, storage, and data center fees, has gone up dramatically over the last two years, recently driven largely by the AI industry’s hunger for hardware. Most importantly, there has been a significant rise in the cost of living of our team members. We have kept our prices unchanged since day one, which meant we’ve been quietly absorbing rising costs on thin margins for a while now, but it’s become increasingly impossible to do so without affecting our sustainability. We’re rolling the changes out gradually, and there’s no lock-in: if our new pricing doesn’t work for your budget, we’ll help you migrate, no hard feelings.
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Some news is fun to write. This one particularly isn’t, but it’s important, so we’d rather be upfront about it than quietly slip it somewhere in a sneaky way. We’re raising the prices of our Managed Hosting packages significantly, and we want to take the time to properly explain why, how, and what we’re doing to make this as manageable as possible for the small and medium teams that make up most of the folks who trust us with their digital infrastructure. Dedicated pricing information and details is planned to be published in the next days.
A bit of history first
For 7+ years, we’ve barely touched our pricing, with a couple of small exceptions. For years, this felt like a reasonable, even good, position to be in: keep things simple, keep things affordable, and let the quality of the service speak for itself. But “we haven’t changed prices” doesn’t mean “our operational costs haven’t changed.” Inflation, the rising cost of living for our team here in Europe, and steadily increasing third-party fees (payment processors, legal and financial compliance, you name it) all crept up, especially after COVID in 2020. We spent a lot of time doing the math last quarter, and it is obvious that we need to reflect these changes in the prices for our packages. To be completely transparent about it: some of our longest-term Subscribers, the ones who’ve trusted us with their infrastructure for years, have told us directly and indirectly that our prices felt low for the quality of service we provide. We knew it too. We kept things as they were for as long as we possibly could, running on thin margins and very lean operational costs, because we didn’t want to pass rising costs on to the teams that rely on us, especially after they took the big leap of faith of moving away from Big Tech. With almost every aspect of our operations being impacted by the higher costs, the only way forward is to reflect those changes in our pricing to minimize our operational risk.
What changed drastically: it’s not just the AI boom
This isn’t really a “Cloud68 problem.” It’s a mix of pressures that pretty much everyone is feeling right now, and it is important for us to share all the context and reasoning behind our decision. Part of the pressure we’ve faced comes from the infrastructure side. Over the last two years, demand for AI infrastructure has grown enormously, and that has heavily increased the cost of memory (by ~249%) and storage (by ~238%), components that every server needs, whether or not it’ll be used for AI. Several of the large European providers we rely on for our Managed Hosting services have already adjusted their prices as a result, in some cases more than once in the same year, doubling their prices (sometimes even more), and we’ve seen rising costs from domain registrars and other suppliers too. We’re unfortunately not immune to any of that.
We’ve been on the receiving end of the AI argument as well, and while we don’t like it, not only is it outside of our control, “machine prices go brr” is not (in our case) the only force causing this change. The cost of living (or simply existing) in Europe has also gone up a lot, and it hasn’t shown any sign of slowing down. Basic and everyday product prices across the EU rose by 33% between 2016 and 2025, according to Eurostat, and the sharpest jumps came in just the last couple of years. Housing tells the same story: Eurostat’s Housing in Europe report shows that rents in most EU countries increased by 25% over the last decade, with much steeper rises in many places, and rents kept climbing in nearly every European country through 2026. Groceries, energy, rent: none of it costs what it did when we last set our prices. Our team members live and work across Europe, and they feel this every month. If we kept our prices frozen while everything around us got more expensive, the gap wouldn’t magically disappear, it would just quietly come at their expense. Running our operation requires a certain amount of constant labor by various colleagues, and we wouldn’t feel comfortable not compensating everyone involved fairly, and being upfront about that feels more honest than pretending our fees somehow work differently from everyone else’s.
Infrastructure improvements for a better uptime
We’re also making a deliberate upgrade to our infrastructure. Until now, we’ve used a file-based storage architecture, which was a reasonable trade-off when we started, but one that showed reliability limits as we grew, something we’ve been hearing in feedback from our Subscribers as well. So we’re migrating to a block-based architecture , which in our testing has been meaningfully more stable. It costs more, but it gives us better uptime and fewer disruptions, and when your team depends on us to just have things up and running, that matters more than maximally optimizing the cost of storage. We operate with far fewer resources than Big Tech, but we don’t think that’s a reason not to work on improving our reliability. Small and medium teams should be able to focus on their mission, not on reporting downtime. It also means our own team can spend less time firefighting and more time improving the service. More on this in another blog post.
How we calculate new fees
We think it’s fair that if we’re asking you to pay more, we explain exactly how we get to a number, rather than just presenting a new price list. Our pricing isn’t based on what the market will bear, or on maximizing margin. It comes down to a fairly simple formula:
- Third-party infrastructure costs: we calculate this based on the median pricing across the data center providers we work with, not the cheapest, not the most expensive.
- Labour costs: based on average, reasonable European salaries for our team, because we’re not cutting costs by underpaying people.
- Operational costs: payment provider fees, financial compliance, taxes, legal costs, hardware, and yes, showing up and supporting our team at community events. We don’t spend on paid advertising, so that’s not a line item here.
- Giving back to the ecosystem: we try to do our part here, within the resources we actually have. We’re not going to pretend we do more than we do, despite our intent to give as much as we can.
- A standard, average profit margin. Nothing inflated, nothing sneaky. Profits get reinvested into improving the service, not distributed to outside investors, because we don’t have any. We’re a small-by-design team: no outside VC funding, no loans.
One more thing worth saying clearly, because it matters to us: we don’t use “loss leader” or other pricing tricks, where one part of a service is priced artificially low to get you in the door and then make up for it elsewhere. What you pay for a package reflects what it actually costs us to run it, plus the standard margin. Nothing more complicated than that. For the past two decades, Big Tech corporations have been giving huge discounts to individuals, educational institutions, NGOs, and governments, sometimes even for free, ultimately locking them in, because they could afford to do so as a marketing exercise (remember that in 2004, a 1GB mailbox was rarely heard of until Gmail). Now, they are using their position of strength in pricing negotiations with said entities, because they know it is not easy to switch from their proprietary offerings to open source ones, or even to other proprietary providers in some cases. You can see this pattern even in the fact that they make extremely easy-to-use tools to migrate your data in, but far less easy ones to migrate out.
How we’re rolling this out
We know that a price increase, however well explained, has real consequences for small and medium teams working with tight budgets, and that’s a big part of who we host. So we’re not flipping a switch overnight. We’ll be rolling out the new pricing gradually, and we’ll be publishing a dedicated post later this week with the exact date the new pricing takes effect, along with details on significant discounts for teams already hosting with us today, as well as friendly discounts for anyone joining us after that. We wanted this post to focus on the “why,” so the “when and how much” gets the dedicated, detailed explanation it deserves.
Add-On services (like migrations from Google Workspace to Nextcloud, user support, office hours, etc.) are not affected right now. We intend to keep it that way for as long as we reasonably can, and we’re not planning changes there before the end of the year at the earliest, barring anything drastic happening in that market too. As you can imagine, this might not be ideal for us operationally, but it is the least we can do to help folks migrate away from Big Tech.
What doesn’t change
Whatever your budget allows, our approach to how we treat the teams we host doesn’t change. We have a strict no vendor lock-in policy, because that’s how we’ve always operated. If our new pricing, even with the discounts we’re planning, doesn’t fit your team’s budget, we’ll do our best to make it easy for your team. That means easy offboarding and all the files and exports you need to migrate to another provider, no guilt trips, no friction. We’d rather you leave on good terms than stay somewhere that doesn’t work for you financially.
Last’, but not least, we’re aware of the budget realities of the small organisations and teams we work with, and this isn’t a decision we’ve taken lightly.
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We’d genuinely appreciate your thoughts on this. If you have questions, concerns, or just want to tell us what you think, our inbox is open for constructive comments, and we’ll make sure to carefully review them.
