Cloudron is amazing but...

[igaudette]

I subscribed to Cloudron about 2 months ago and loved its simplicity. So to start, I want to say how much I love the product.

However, let's be honest... You are lagging in terms of adding new apps. The amount of apps in the marketplace isn't great compared to other solutions. Or maybe I should say it differently... We are in 2024 and there are a lot of apps that are exploding in popularity and it seems Cloudron doesn't bother to add them. To name a few:

AppSmith, Budibase, ERPNext, AppFlowy, Supabase, Plane, and popular agentic platforms such as Autogen, Langflow, etc....

All these apps could play a big role in any business and despite having all the requirements to be added to Cloudron, they are still not there despite the amount of votes.

So being forced to install some of these apps to boost the productivity of my company, I decided to set up a new VPS and install some of the other Cloudron alternatives like Dokploy, CapRover, and Coolify.

These solutions are not beginner-friendly at all... How to update the apps installed? How to back up them? Brief... They are far behind Cloudron in terms of ease of use and features.

So this post is not meant to say bad things about Cloudron because it's an amazing product... but I would highly appreciate it if Cloudron could stop being so restrictive on the apps they add and try to be more "open-minded".

I have seen on another thread a staff confirming adding new apps were not in their priorities and that they were focusing on maintaining current apps. Damn... it's so bad because there are so many good apps in the open-source community and there is no way to install them easily.

That would be great too to see what others think about my post, maybe if we are more people sharing the same thoughts, Cloudron may be more receptive.

Finger crossed

[humptydumpty]

Maybe you haven’t noticed but the staff had to unlist multiple apps recently because they were abandoned. App popularity isn’t and shouldn’t be the only deciding factor here. Like you said, the competition lacks when it comes to the core features like backups, etc.. While I’d love to see more apps on here, I’m anxiously waiting for the multiple backup destinations and multi-server management features. We can always package apps ourselves if it’s critical and share the repo with Cloudron if we want to lend a hand.

[SansGuidon]

I tend to think the right solution for now is in the middle of prioritizing the right apps for Cloudron core team, while also having more community contributors and docs to make it easy to package new apps with sane defaults without help of Cloudron staff, relying on scripts or templates to rely on to avoid too long feedback loops between Cloudron staff and users.

I'm myself interested to help packaging a few apps for Cloudron as I have the skills, I love Cloudron, and I'm Developer/DevOps/SRE very focused on automation/docs and eliminating chore and repetitive tasks. I'm building a small app for my needs right now and I'll likely package it for Cloudron as a custom app, then I bet it will build me some more experience to contribute back to package other apps.

Before finishing this post, it would be very customer-friendly to maybe have a known roadmap of such apps Cloudron staff is busy packaging and the ones for which the staff sees an interest but lacks time, and where community effort is welcome. Having maybe the staff delegating the packaging for some apps to its enthusiastic users will spread the knowledge and increase the speed to ship.

I do agree that I'd love to see at least 2/3x more apps being packaged in Cloudron every year

[igaudette]

@SansGuidon That would be indeed amazing! I know we have the capabilities of adding custom apps but this is not everyone that has the skill to do so.

I am sure a lot of people are like me and decided to subscribe to Cloudron because they don't know about installing and managing apps, that's the main point of using Cloudron (At least for me).

I agree that having a roadmap would be awesome! I looked at the announcement of new apps and the average is 2-3 new apps monthly... but it's now almost 1 month since the last app and we haven't seen any new apps added yet. I can't wait to see what the team will add... I just hope it's a popular requested app. There are a lot of apps with a lot of votes that look amazing.

[timconsidine]

@igaudette I think you underestimate the maintenance obligations that come with adding an app to the AppStore. Cloudron takes this more seriously than other Platforms.
I looked at others but grew fed up with the number of unmaintained apps on things like Caprover, Yunohost, and even on the newer alterntives.

[igaudette]

@timconsidine Yes I have no doubt it requires a lot of times.

My point is that the apps added are so random... You try to please everyone but the paid subscription is more adapted to business users.

If you would focus on adding more apps that can help business growth and save money, you would have much more paid users.

I own many businesses and there are a lot of open source apps that can help us scale and minimize our costs. Some have been voted many times here, but despite this, they never been added.

I understand you may want to prioritize simpler apps to manage but is it the main point of paying Cloudron, to get complex apps fully managed?

I have seen a lot of users posting on this forum and say they would pay a higher subscription to have access to more business-oriented apps but all these replies seem ignored.

I'm not saying increase your price (pls folks don't throw me rocks lol) but if you limit good apps just because you feel we don't pay enough to justify the maintenance costs, then I believe you should really considering a new plan that give access to those premium apps. What you have to lose doing this? For a business paying 30$ or 40$ it's nothing. More revenue for you, make your business users happy.

Seem a win-win.