Who is building/ running a business on top of Cloudron? What's your model? :)

[jdaviescoates]

I love Cloudron and I love open source apps. I want more people to use them. I'm thinking of offering Cloudron-based services to people, but still thinking about how I could best do that...

What I'd really like to be able to do is to offer groups access to an affordable suite of their own self-hosted apps for collaboration.

I'm thinking of starting with

1. Rocket.Chat
2. Nextcloud (+ OnlyOffice), and
3. WeKan

(given that the most widely used business/ collaboration tools are Slack, G Suite and Trello according to StackShare.io).

However, I think in order to really make this a viable an attractive option to groups just starting up I think perhaps the Cloudron pricing model would need to change.

Anyways, I'm really interested in what others are doing. Are you selling services on top of Cloudron? How are you doing it? How do you work out your pricing etc?

@yusf I've seen you mention that you run numerous Cloudron servers and have various clients - are these paying clients? Please share!

Thanks!

(another related question to @girish and @nebulon is how stable/ financially sustainable is Cloudron at present? Obviously I don't want to go ahead and build something on top of a service which may potentially die or be taken over by Vulture Capitalists! )

[yusf]

Thanks for this topic. I find the discussion interesting by both relating to what I'm currently doing but also to a wider prospect of Cloudron-based projects.

What I've done for some non-profit clients is that I've set up their accounts and subscription individually for each client. So yes, everyone I've helped to get up and running are paying subscribers IIRC.

I'm currently not running a continous business operation serving and/or supporting these instances, but the thought has occurred. An enterprise built on top of another one in such a direct way does pose some questions of the upstream business model and health of Cloudron of course, but from what I've experienced so far the sailing's been smooth and the values seem aligned with mine. The relicensing was disappointing but I hope that can be worked out somehow.

[fbartels]

@jdaviescoates there is a special hosted pricing of you want to manage and resell subscriptions

[jdaviescoates]

@fbartels said in Who is building/ running a business on top of Cloudron? What's your model? :

@jdaviescoates there is a special hosted pricing of you want to manage and resell subscriptions

I assume you're refering to:
https://cloudron.io/documentation/hosting-provider/#hosting-edition_1

However, I emailed support about that recently and @girish said:

Recently, we decided to merge the hosting edition into the main product. So that page is going away very soon

Although, yes, he did also add:

For pricing, it's no different from our current pricing except we give a discount if you need help to get started or if you already have volume. For example, say x% discount if you have more than 10 subscriptions. We are flexible here, let me know what the current state of your business is and we can adjust accordingly.

I must get around to replying to that email...

[girish]

@jdaviescoates For pricing, as mentioned, we just offer discounted pricing on a case by case basis. Given we are a small company ourselves, we don't want Cloudron pricing to be a blocker for another business relying on us. We have a dozen or so re-sellers and they are generally IT admins, sysadmins who host for co ops, non-profits and schools.

As for Cloudron the company itself, we are profitable and pay ourselves a salary, and I can say we are not going away anytime soon. We are completely bootstrapped and haven't tried to ever raise money nor do we plan to. Future wise, one thing we really want to happen it is to grow to a size where we can start supporting upstream opensource apps - either by contributing with people or funding them.

[jdaviescoates]

Thanks @girish that's all really great to hear sounds like I really need to get around to replying to that email soon

May I ask, who are the owners of Cloudron? I'm assuming it's currently just you and @nebulon at present, right? Equal owners?

Many thanks!

Josef.

[girish]

@jdaviescoates said in Who is building/ running a business on top of Cloudron? What's your model? :

My I ask, who are the owners of Cloudron? I'm assuming it's currently just you and @nebulon at present, right? Equal owners?

Yup. And we are incorporated in Germany because @nebulon is german.

[Thulani]

While on that one , it will be if they stop repeating "same tools" , let us vote on which one to keep, for example Mattersmost vs Rocketchat , instead introduce new tools like HRMS (think Sentrifugo or OrangeHRM) , LMS (moodle) etc. In that way Cloudron will be a complete SMB server.

[scooke]

@Thulani I have Moodle installed in the LAMP app; it looks like something like OrangeHRM, and even Sentrifugo, is also installable via the LAMP app. I'll give them a whirl and see if they are.

(some time later...) Ok, both Sentrifugo and OrangeHRM installed fine; there was a bit of a trial and error setting up email correctly with Sentrifugo but it worked out. Sentrifugo is running well now on the LAMP app with just 256MB ram; OrangeHRm keeps giving me weird SQL errors when adding (but failing) new employees (SQLSTATE[22007]: Invalid datetime format: 1292 Incorrect datetime value: '2020-06-13 09:53:34pm' for column 'created_date' at row 1) and other error messages.