Replacing Google Drive for a 300-Person Company With Nextcloud on PaaS: The Buyer's Numbers

The operations director at an engineering consultancy we will call Brightwater Associates had two problems with Google Drive: a per-seat invoice that grew with every hire, and client contracts that increasingly asked where documents were stored and who could be compelled to hand them over. She evaluated Nextcloud on MassiveGRID PaaS, the platform built on Virtuozzo Application Platform (formerly Jelastic), for 300 staff and 4 TB of documents. These are her numbers, her assumptions and what she found out in the first month.

The two invoices side by side

Brightwater's Google Workspace bill was straightforward: a per-user monthly fee across 300 accounts, with storage pooled. Headcount was growing 15% a year, so the invoice was too, and the storage included per user was far more than most staff used while a few project archives blew through it.

Nextcloud on the platform has no per-user component. The Nextcloud package installs the application server, a database and expandable storage, and MassiveGRID bills three things: compute in cloudlets (128 MiB of RAM plus 400 MHz of CPU, $0.003372 per cloudlet-hour or $2.46 per cloudlet per month at the published rate), disk per gigabyte used, and external traffic per gigabyte. Volume discounts apply automatically as usage grows. The director's first realisation was that her 300 users were irrelevant to the bill; what mattered was 4 TB of files and how hard 300 desktop clients would work the server.

Sizing for 300 desktop clients

Nextcloud's load is dominated by sync clients polling for changes and by file uploads, not by the number of accounts. Working with MassiveGRID's team, the director sized the environment as follows and then let the platform prove it.

The reserved floor of 14 cloudlets costs about $34 a month before the reserved-cloudlet discount. The dynamic headroom is charged only in the hours it is used, and the platform's statistics showed the application server touching 20 to 24 cloudlets for about two hours each weekday morning, then settling back. Disk at 4 TB and a public IP for the custom domain were the other lines. In total the director budgeted a few hundred dollars a month with generous rounding, against a per-seat invoice that was several times that and rising.

What the platform did that the RFP asked about

• Location. The environment was created in the London region, and every container, including the storage, is there. That answered the client contracts in one line, and it kept the consultancy inside the GDPR framework its clients audit against.
• Encryption in transit. The Let's Encrypt add-on issued and now renews the certificate for files.brightwater.example, checking daily and renewing thirty days before expiry.
• Availability. Each container runs on its own physical host, is live-migrated if that host degrades, and is covered by MassiveGRID's 100% uptime SLA. For a higher bar, the same package can be scaled to several application servers behind a load balancer, which the companion post covers.
• Backups. The Database Backup/Restore add-on dumps MariaDB nightly to a separate Backup Storage node; the file store is snapshotted at the environment level and mirrored to the consultancy's own object storage with rsync from the built-in web SSH.
• Who can see what. Account collaboration gave the IT manager an operator role and the finance lead a read-only role that shows usage and billing history, so the invoice is auditable without giving finance a way to break the server.

The migration month

Migration was the cost the director had feared most, and it turned out to be mostly people time. The technical steps were short.

1. Install the Nextcloud package, attach the domain and certificate, connect the company's identity provider through Nextcloud's SAML app so staff use their existing logins.
2. Run a Google Drive export per department into the Nextcloud data directory using the platform's web SSH, then Nextcloud's file scan so the database learns the files. The 4 TB moved over a weekend; internal traffic between platform nodes is free, and inbound external traffic was the only transfer cost.
3. Recreate shared folders as Nextcloud group folders with the same permissions, which the IT manager scripted from the old sharing report.
4. Roll out the desktop client by department over three weeks, with the old Drive read-only from week two. Vertical scaling absorbed the initial sync storms without anyone raising a limit.

The platform's own contribution to the migration was the clone button. Before each department moved, IT cloned the production environment, rehearsed that department's import and sharing script on the clone, then deleted it. A stopped or deleted clone costs nothing beyond the hours it ran, so rehearsal was cheap enough to do every time.

What the director would tell another buyer

First, price the storage and the compute, not the users. Nextcloud on a per-gigabyte, per-cloudlet platform inverts the SaaS curve: adding a hundred staff who store little costs almost nothing, adding a terabyte of CAD files costs exactly a terabyte. Second, decide the region first, because it settles half the contractual questions before any feature is discussed. Third, keep a managed option in view. MassiveGRID also offers fully managed Nextcloud hosting, and for a company without an IT manager willing to own updates, that service, not the self-service package, is the right comparison to Google Workspace.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Nextcloud on PaaS include office document editing?

Nextcloud's app store adds Collabora Online or ONLYOFFICE. The built-in Collabora server is fine for small teams; for 300 staff, a dedicated office server node in the same environment is the recommended layout, and it scales in cloudlets like every other node.

How is 4 TB of storage billed and can it grow?

Disk is billed per gigabyte per hour of actual usage on MassiveGRID PaaS, with volume discounts, and the storage allocation is increased from the dashboard without downtime. For very large or highly available storage, the GlusterFS package or MassiveGRID's HA cloud storage can be attached as external storage.

What does the 300 users cost in Nextcloud licensing?

Nothing. Nextcloud Server is open source under the AGPLv3 with no per-user fee. Nextcloud GmbH sells optional enterprise subscriptions with support and long-term-supported releases, which are independent of MassiveGRID's hosting charge.