File sync and storage
Self-hosted alternatives to Dropbox Business, priced
3 open-source tools that can replace Dropbox Business, each shown with what it would actually cost to run for a team of 10 people. Dropbox Business on the Standard tier costs $139 a month at that size.
| Tool | Server only | With your time | vs Dropbox Business | Operational weight | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nextcloud | $37.20 | $150 | -$831 | medium | AGPL-3.0 |
| Seafile | $37.20 | $150 | -$831 | medium | source-available |
| Immich | $103 | $328 | -$8,007 | hard | AGPL-3.0 |
The final column is the 36-month difference: positive means self-hosting is cheaper.
Which one to pick
Nextcloud 36,777 stars
Disk per user is the line that decides this comparison, not RAM. At 15 GB a head, storage overtakes compute well before 50 users.
At 10 people it needs 2.8 GB of memory and 170 GB of disk, which fits the Starter 4 GB plus a 90 GB volume at VPSServer for $31.00 a month. Setting it up is roughly 6 hours of work, then 1.5 hours a month to keep it healthy.
Full Dropbox Business versus Nextcloud breakdown · Nextcloud at every team size
Seafile 15,236 stars
Block-level sync makes it noticeably faster than Nextcloud on large files, at the cost of a much smaller app ecosystem.
At 10 people it needs 2.7 GB of memory and 170 GB of disk, which fits the Starter 4 GB plus a 90 GB volume at VPSServer for $31.00 a month. Setting it up is roughly 6 hours of work, then 1.5 hours a month to keep it healthy.
Full Dropbox Business versus Seafile breakdown · Seafile at every team size
Immich 113,881 stars
Server, machine-learning container, PostgreSQL with pgvector, and Redis. The ML container is what sets the 4 GB floor, and photo storage dominates the total cost.
At 10 people it needs 5.2 GB of memory and 620 GB of disk, which fits the Starter 8 GB plus a 470 GB volume at VPSServer for $86.00 a month. Setting it up is roughly 16 hours of work, then 3 hours a month to keep it healthy.
Full Dropbox Business versus Immich breakdown · Immich at every team size
How the pricing was established
Dropbox Business pricing was read from its own pricing page on 2026-10-09, quoted in euros and converted at 1.1592 dollars to the euro, the Frankfurter, European Central Bank reference rates rate for 2026-09-11. Server prices come from the providers listed on the hosting page. The sizing model and the cost of your time are set out in full on the methodology page.