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AeroFS is now free up to 30 users
- Fastidious 12y agoIt requires VirtualBox, VMWare, EC2, or similar—in other words, you can't just install this on your DigitalOcean droplet, or your Vultr cloud server.
- yurisagalov 12y agoWe'd actually love to support DigitalOcean. I think I've reached out to them in the past and haven't gotten a response. So, if someone is reading there, send us a bump! I'm at yuri@aerofs.com
- Fastidious 12y agoIt requires VirtualBox, VMWare, EC2, or similar—in other words, you can't just install this on your DigitalOcean droplet, or your Vultr cloud server.
- skrowl 12y agoSeems like a more professional version of BitTorrent Sync
- winter_blue 12y agoThe price suddenly jumps from $0 to $525/mo (35 x $15/mo) when going from 30 users to 35 users. When you just need 5 more users than the free, you don't just pay $15/mo for the 5 extra users, but have to pay for $15/mo for the previously free 30 users as well. This is most likely going to discourage startups and other small-but-growing companies from using AeroFS.
- ianlevesque 12y agoI can understand the perspective, but if you have 35 (or even 31) people at your company, $500 a month is not a significant expenditure compared to salaries.
- baldfat 12y agoTo bad 99% of managers never think that way. Usually it is salaries are a fixed amount in our budget this extra money needs to go through the process of being approved = Make people work longer to save the hassle. No one accounts for the most expensive cost which is salaries.
- josho 12y agoIf you have a product (any product) in daily use by 30 staff, then switching costs (productivity hit) likely become the dominant factor in making a decision. I would be shocked that $500/mth comes into the picture when the salary expense has gotta be north of $100,000 a month for 30 staff.
- joshstrange 12y agoI'll refer you back to the "Shadow IT" that was mentioned in the article, while the company I work out has the money to spend on something like this it would never go anywhere since we are a "startup" (Stretching the definition a little) and any cost over $0 is heavily scrutinized (for better or worse). We still use jabber because "It's Free" and now that we have 70-odd employees switching to Slack/HipChat seems like a huge expense. I will readily admit that the issue here isn't as much the cost as much as the people making the decisions thinking that ChatProgramA == ChatProgramB except for ChatProgramA.cost < ChatProgramB.cost where ChatProgramA.cost == $0.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoI suggest Sococo (I work there). Free. Includes chat, webcam/audio spaces, doc sharing. Best for distributed teams, especially if practicing Agile.
- joshstrange 12y agoThanks! I think we may have just pushed through at least a trial run of HipChat but I'll pass it along and check it out myself.
- machbio 12y agoI think it is more of to do with the extra features, you get with the Business plan - https://www.aerofs.com/pricing/ https://www.aerofs.com/pricing/
- biokoda 12y agoThere are also way cheaper options out there for the same features. Like Emit Cloud http://www.emitcloud.com/home http://www.emitcloud.com/home
- vidarh 12y agoWhen I tested Emit Cloud at work the other week, the OS X client seg. faulted.
- yurisagalov 12y agoI suppose that depends on whether the customer thinks they're getting $500/mo of value out of the product :) If they don't, I certainly wouldn't fault them for not buying the product.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoIt's different when you're adding another person and it's adding an additional 15$/month, and adding an additional 500$/month - even if overall it ends up being the same per person overall for both. Think of it this way. If you've got 30 people, you're using this product. Then you add another person. Now all of a sudden you've got 500$/month expenditures suddenly appearing. The sudden appearance is much more likely to push people to alternative routes than a gradual increase.
- sgrove 12y agoThat's madness. What's the payroll for 30 people? $500/month isn't going to put a dent in that.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoIt's not much, compared to other expenses, yes. But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that someone is much more likely to look around for alternatives to do something if an expanse suddenly pops up than if an expense gradually does.
- _dark_matter_ 12y agoSeems like a good point. What it should be is an increased gradient for the next 30 customers, i.e. after 30, each additional is $30 a month, and then after 60, each additional is back to $15. This would get rid of the cliff at 30, but still give you guys the same revenue at 60.
- joshstrange 12y agoI said a similar thing in another comment thread, I agree it's WAY too big of a jump. Especially since a lot of newer companies are already using Google Apps (so they get storage included, unlimited if they have 5+ users) because it let's them scale up and have fixed costs... 3x that cost/mo for dropbox/gdrive on YOUR OWN hardware? $15/u/mo AFTER 30 seems reasonable but going from $0 (30 users) -> $465 (31 users) is odd....
- kirillzubovsky 12y agoOn the other hand, that's exactly what Dropbox for business would cost you, but you don't get the luxury of trying it for free. Also, if a startup is >30 people, they probably have enough $ to afford to pay. 30 people is very, very liberal.
- sashk 12y agoDo they still require Java installed?
- weihan 12y agoNo longer :)
- yurisagalov 12y agonope.
- aidos 12y agoHow does it work now? Has the client been rewritten? I've just been going back over my emails from about a year ago when we decided to stop using aerofs because of stability issues. It doesn't make for pretty reading.
- sandstrom 12y agoMy question as well. I like almost everything about AeroFS, except that the OS X client is (or seems to be) written in Java and doesn't feel native. It's kind of sluggish.
- aidos 12y agoThe problems we had were, unfortunately, a little deeper than that. We had to restart the client again and again to get it to sync. Eventually it gave up altogether. At the time it took Aero customer support almost 2 weeks to respond. By that point we'd decided to migrate to dropbox. That was a long time back so hopefully they've sorted out the issues now (with the client and lack of response with customer support). At the time it was fairly obvious to us that we couldn't use them for a key part of our business - it was just too risky.
- mpillar 12y agoSorry to hear you had a bad experience with our support team. Things have gotten much better in this area at our organization. Our average time to respond these days is a few hours. If you ever decide to give us another shot feel free to ping me, I'd be happy to help you get up and running.
- chrisdotcode 12y agoOn a tangential note, I had no idea what AeroFS is, so I clicked on their landing page. > Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall. File Sync and Share for the enterprise. Free up to 30 users. Boom. I immediately am fully educated about what this does. I wasn't forced to watch a 2 minute video with no sound at work, or to google the product - questioning about why it's popular[0]. This is how you write effective copy. [0] Notable offenders are yeoman and dropbox itself - both of which, while widely-used products - are completely opaque in what they do from their initial text. "You already know what I do" isn't good enough for people who don't.
- auxym 12y agoMight be just me not being an IT guy, but from that copy I'm not sure how it differs from a traditional file server with cifs/whatever shares like most businesses already have.
- tommi 12y agoI think it's the opposite: to me you sound like an IT guy since you know about cifs and file servers and you have hard time understanding the value because you are looking from a technical instead of user perspective.
- dagw 12y agoAeroFS syncs files to the local hard drive, meaning you can access them when not connected to the office network. It also automatically syncs any changes once you reconnect.
- auxym 12y agoThanks, makes sense. Cool for having access to your work stuff on your laptop with having to vpn in all the time.
- bbx 12y agoExactly my reaction. I love this tagline because it just echoes how you would describe the product to a friend: "Oh it's like X but with Y". It's at the complete opposite of the general trend of obscure generic headlines, like "Make your life better" or "Be more productive" or "Gain time and money", or the worst "Sign up for free" (yes, I've seen that as the main headline). It just makes sense to not waste your visitors' time because they won't stay long enough to decipher your marketing gibberish.
- mercnet 12y agoI recommend AeroFS for anyone that wants to sync computers over their local network in real time. In the past, I used Microsoft Live Mesh to sync files between my desktop and laptop but it was discontinued. Every other application I checked out required uploading data to the cloud first, e.g. dropbox would upload to cloud first then sync over LAN. Other applications, would only upload to cloud and then download from cloud which is a pain for large files and slow internet connections.
- room505 12y agoNone of these cloud storage companies seem to provide a very important feature I can never seem to find in their documentation - file locking. It's the one feature missing that keeps us from using cloud storage.
- yurisagalov 12y agoHey there! Do you mind explaining the use case in a bit more detail?
- room505 12y agoIn the architectural industry, we use AutoCAD drawing files that require only one person to open and edit the file. Most cloud storage options don't lock the file when it's being accessed. Other people are able to open and edit the file and therefore the cloud software doesn't know which file was the parent holder and instead updates the file based on the most recent changes.Even Microsoft's Dynamic Cache Service doesn't have a file locking feature. Therefore we need to use something called GlobalScape.
- latortuga 12y agoSounds like architects need a DVCS for CAD files :)
- ska 12y agoThis is the space things like solidworks EPDM are trying to service.
- sreitshamer 12y agoYou could try Panzura or Nasuni. They both have file locking and are targeted at use cases like you describe.
- ironrabbit 12y agoAeroFS does allow you to share folders in a read-only way, so that only one-way syncing takes place. If only one user is authorized to edit a file, I think this should work for your use case, no?
- discardorama 12y agoOn another tangential note: is there anything like this for home users? Say I have 1TB of "stuff" lying around at home (music, movies, photos, docs), and I want to share it: with my GF, across various devices, etc. I want to be able to stream music, movies off of my storage; save/delete files, etc. All securely, of course.
- cilantro1994 12y agoYou can try tonido (http://www.tonido.com http://www.tonido.com) for personal use.
- draugadrotten 12y agoTake a look at https://owncloud.org/ https://owncloud.org/ which may fit your needs
- fapjacks 12y agoPlease do not use OwnCloud. We just got through several months of hell trying to pin down an awful issue with OwnCloud: It eats files. Somehow the server loses track of files and then syncs this state to all the other clients. We went through months of trying to track down what was happening to our business documents, only to be totally shocked in the end that it was OwnCloud itself. This is also a rather open secret among the OwnCloud developers and community. It's just something that happens sometimes, and the "solution" is to use another form of backup (thereby effectively negating the original purpose of using OwnCloud). If you value the data you are storing, do not use OwnCloud!
- dspillett 12y agoI've heard this sort of thing a couple of times but never seen any evidence (specific examples or ways that reliably reproduce the problem, online discussions about it (i.e. on support forums), and so forth). I'm considering a small OwnCloud install for myself[], freinds & family, so any info you can pass on would help evaluating that. Also, if you can recommend alternatives to look into, that would be nice. What do you now use instead? [] Actually for my own backups I'll be sticking with my own set of rsync paths that have worked well for quite some time, but OwnCloud will be for sharing stuff and giving people an easy backup option to encourage them to actually have an off-device backup (it'll reduce the "I've deleted X can you get it back for me?" and "my laptop died with all my stuff on it, is there anything you can do?" requests I get!).
- insaneirish 12y agoReally hoping they implement the storage provider/document picker functionality in their iOS app.
- avggeek 12y agoI actually asked this same question to their support team and was told full iOS 8 compatibility is coming later this year. No hard timelines yet though.
- dochtman 12y agoI used AeroFS a bunch for private stuff, and it was okayish, but never a really friendly product. I've since transitioned to Syncthing, which is open source (in Go) and actually has better UI in my opinion (at least for my usage).
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y agoOn an unrelated note, maybe there is something to this "open source (in Go)" phenomenon. I'm starting to think it's more than just a popularity contest, and has something to do with the engineer friendliness of Go. Edit: But then I looked at syncthing's git repo and thought, nah!
- saljam 12y agoWhat's wrong with their git repo?
- dochtman 12y agoI've actually found building Go (Syncthing, in particular) for the packaging system I use (Gentoo's Portage) a complete PITA, to the point where I don't understand how it can be so broken. And I'm not really a fan of the language itself. Still, people are building some nifty things with it, so there must be something they like!
- zachlatta 12y agoReally? I'd be interested to know what sorts of issues you ran into. It's always been fairly trivial for me to make PKGBUILDs in Arch for projects that are built with Go.
- zachlatta 12y agoReally? I'd be interested to know what sorts of issues you ran into. It's always been fairly trivial for me to make PKGBUILDs in Arch for projects that are built with Go.
- danudey 12y ago
- jstalin 12y agoI like the idea, but the pricing seems unreasonable. $15/mo/user (over 35 users) for what? With dropbox or box at least you get the storage space off-premise. All this does is sync your files across your own hardware. I'm in a company looking for an enterprise-grade solution for our 5,000+ users, but this quickly became a non-option when I saw the pricing.
- yurisagalov 12y agoIf you're looking for a solution for 5,000 users, we should chat :) Feel free to shoot me an email at yuri@aerofs.com
- biokoda 12y agoThere is also http://www.emitcloud.com/home http://www.emitcloud.com/home
- xxcode 12y agoWe use Microsoft OneDrive which is bundled with our office 365 license. Pretty good. Strongly recommended.
- minot 12y ago> We use Microsoft OneDrive which is bundled with our office 365 license. Pretty good. Strongly recommended. I'd like to pitch in until the parent clarifies but they probably mean OneDrive and not OneDrive for Business. To anyone reading this, please stay away from OneDrive for Business. It is NOT OneDrive and you will regret using it.
- realusername 12y agoYeah, I can confirm this comment... We are using OneDrive for Business for various reasons, I strongly advice to stay away from OneDrive for Business if you can...
- BinaryIdiot 12y ago> I like the idea, but the pricing seems unreasonable. $15/mo/user (over 35 users) for what? Yeah it seems like a good idea but the value proposition confuses me. Granted I understand most enterprise software works like this but when you have to buy all of the resources to handle the files it sounds really expensive for just some light software.
- impostervt 12y agoAre there any open-source equivalents to AeroFS, or Dropbox for that matter? Could work well for my work, but we'd need to tinker with it.
- peterlvilim 12y agohttps://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- test9969 12y agohttps://owncloud.org/ https://owncloud.org/
- theandrewbailey 12y agoI've been playing with Owncloud, but I read a lot of horror stories about it this week. https://owncloud.org/ https://owncloud.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9206002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9206002
- senorsmile 12y agohttp://seafile.com/en/product/private_server/ http://seafile.com/en/product/private_server/ I've been using it for a few months hosted on a vultr vps. All files are encrypted on the clients, and there are no limits. From what I've seen, it doesn't fall into the upgrade issues that owncloud has seen.
- fapjacks 12y agoI use Seafile for personal data sync and I couldn't be happier. It is great!
- stinos 12y agoBeen using it for close to a year now and very satisfied with it. Only upgraded a couple of times and no problems so far. Major selling points for me: ability to select any number of different folders to sync, ability to connect to any number of servers (i.e. at work I connect to both my personal server and the one which backs up my job related files), seems plenty fast
- stalcottsmith 12y agoOr you could buy a Synology like I did and forget paying rent per user. Integrates with LDAP. Comes with a ton of useful software but I bought it mostly for CloudStation and a local file server for large files/collections we didn't want to keep on our workstations or laptops. CloudStation provides remote file sync which we are using to replace Dropbox. Also you can hook up your IP security cams, run a mail server, ftp, iTunes server, whatever... nice web based UX. I'm thinking of buying another smaller one for home.
- rdl 12y agoThis is big news. AeroFS is one of the most underused tools available today. It is by far my favorite way to exchange files securely with people; the distant #2 is a "secure data room" hosted on a TLS website, and #3 is PGP-encrypted email.
- chrisper 12y agoHow is this different from OwnCloud?
- Mahn 12y agoPerhaps a bit of a stupid question but I've always wondered: how do companies that offer self deployed services like AeroFS or Github Entreprise avoid being hacked by dishonest customers to bypass their pricing plans limitations? Or is that simply not a concern?
- danudey 12y agoPeople who want free stuff just use Dropbox or other free alternatives. People who use something like AeroFS generally do so because their stuff is important enough to pay money to maintain. As someone who's trying to figure out this exact situation for one of our teams, I'm not going to try to pirate something and then try to maintain it. I want to be able to call someone and make them help me fix things. I want to know that I'm getting security updates on my appliance. If I wanted to do all that work myself then I would just build it myself from e.g. BitTorrent Sync. Besides, the last thing you want as a corporation with data so sensitive you want to keep it in-house is to trust it to pirated, unsupported third-party software with no support and then have someone snitch on you and end up getting sued for some huge amount on top of that. Sure-fire way to get… well, fired.
- conductr 12y agoMy guess is that it's just not a problem worth investing in. They probably only made it somewhat difficult to hack, knowing 1) it's not worth the gain achieved is not really worth the time hacking 2) if someone does hack it, well they were never going to pay anyways... blocked.
- bmm6o 12y agoYou typically view your licensing schemes as keeping honest customers honest. Also, violating licensing terms like that is not something that any serious company does. All it takes is one disgruntled employee to blow the whistle on your hacking and the 1) IT manager is out of a job and 2) the company is going to have an unwinnable lawsuit on its hands. It's not a risk professionals take. And it doesn't have to be a whistle-blower. It can also come up while you are trying to get support for a problem with the software. In the log files or something your colleague didn't know he shouldn't say.
- danudey 12y agoI was really excited by this announcement, until I read the comparison. The 'Free (for up to 30 users)' doesn't include the single most important feature to me: LDAP integration. In other words, I can host it myself, but I'm not actually testing out any of the features I want to try so it doesn't matter anyway. If I want that I have to pay money anyway, so this is completely pointless for me (and, I suspect, others as well).
- jbverschoor 12y agoHappy user for over 3 years.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- proactivesvcs 12y agoShame I cannot even browse their web site: paragraph 2 of their terms expressly prohibit it, since I'm acting on behalf of my business. Maybe I'll stick with other solutions. Same goes with BitTorrent Sync - their current paid-for version 2 expressly prohibits business use. Sigh. Their beta versions also did for some time, despite the fact they solicited business' success stories. People were even crazy enough to link to their commercial web site, using BT Sync products as a fundamental part of their service, against BitTorrent's terms of service.
- yurisagalov 12y agoI'm sorry you found the language confusing, but it's far from the intent (I've actually fired off an email to the lawyers to see if we can clear it up). Specifically, when you see language like this used by us or other people, the idea is that someone would not be able to come onto your website and use the content or features of your website for the purpose of driving their own business. The main purpose of this is that any commercial benefit from your website should really belong to you. They are of course free to come onto the website to learn more about and purchase the products and services, which they are then permitted to use under the applicable product license agreement or terms of service. Hope that's helpful!
- proactivesvcs 12y agoThank you for replying so promptly and for taking my concerns into account. When I see language like that used by anyone I stop what I'm doing, unless I'm there for personal reasons. I respect the wishes of other organisations and if they make it seem like they don't want me there, I take it seriously. When people come to me for services, I expect them to take my terms just as seriously. It is genuinely nice to see terms that are concise, even if on this occasion, I may have misunderstood. I have avoided quite a number of products and services not because I was forbidden to use them, but because of the ambiguity that large, badly-formed documents cause. If your lawyers and my sense of reasoning can come to a compromise I am still curious about what AeroFS has to offer so will return!
- Veratyr 12y agoNot sure if this is the best place to ask but is there any chance of custom storage drivers for the Team Server? I'd love to be able to integrate with <insert favourite cloud provider> and I'm sure many businesses would love to as well. Also the "Learn more about Team Server storage options" link on https://www.aerofs.com/features/flexible-storage/ https://www.aerofs.com/features/flexible-storage/ is currently broken.
- voltagex_ 12y agoIs this a replacement/competitor for Bittorrent Sync? There was no mention of the Android client on the site.
- rsobers 12y agoDoes the data ultimately live upstream on a corporate file server somewhere? Or is it pure peer-to-peer sync?
- yurisagalov 12y agoThe data ultimately lives upstream on a corporate file server, so long as you install the "AeroFS Team Server" -- which is the backing storage agent. The Team Server is indeed optional, so you could theoretically just run things in a peer-to-peer manner, but really the recommended environment is to have the Team Server up and running.