Self-Hosted Cloud Storage

Overview

Prachyam Studios was running Google Workspace Business Standard and LucidLink Business side by side — one for email and documents, one for large video file sharing across two offices. Combined, the two products cost ~₹8.90 L/year (~$9,585/year) for a 22-person team. LucidLink is particularly punishing for video-heavy teams because it charges per seat and meters egress on assets that are regularly hundreds of gigabytes.

The replacement is a self-hosted Nextcloud instance on a ₹6,000/year (~$65/year) RackNerd VPS, backed by a pCloud 5 TB lifetime plan as durable cold storage, with rclone handling async sync between the two tiers. Mailcow's OAuth2 endpoint — already running for team email — serves as the login provider, so team members sign in with their existing @prachyam.com credentials. From the user's perspective it is Google Drive: a desktop sync client, a web UI, shared folders, no new passwords.

Year 1 cost including the pCloud lifetime license: ~₹61,604 (~$664). Year 2 onwards: ~₹6,000/year (~$65/year).

The Challenge

The team was non-technical across the board. Any replacement requiring behavioural change — a new client, a different folder structure, a separate login — risked low adoption and a reversion to the old stack. The replacement had to feel identical to what people already used, install quietly, and stay out of the way.

Storage architecture added a harder technical constraint. pCloud does not offer a POSIX mount fast enough for concurrent multi-user access with large video files. Mounting it directly as Nextcloud's data directory would have made every file operation dependent on pCloud's API latency — visible lag on every upload, download, and directory listing. The design had to fully decouple user-facing I/O speed from the cold storage backend.

Architecture

Nextcloud runs in Docker Compose on the RackNerd VPS behind a Caddy reverse proxy handling HTTPS termination on a custom team subdomain. The VPS disk is partitioned into an 80 GB local buffer that serves as Nextcloud's primary data directory — all user reads and writes hit local disk at full VPS I/O speed. A scheduled rclone job runs every 15 minutes in the background, syncing the buffer to pCloud using rclone sync with conflict resolution. pCloud is the durable cold store; the VPS buffer is the fast-access layer.

Authentication flows through Mailcow OAuth2. Nextcloud is configured as an OAuth2 client pointing at the Mailcow endpoint already running for team mail — onboarding a new team member means one credentials step, not two. Both offices reach the Nextcloud subdomain over Tailscale, the same mesh used for mail and AI inference, with no public port exposure required for internal access.

Key Decisions

Two-tier buffer over direct pCloud mount. Nextcloud's native External Storage app can mount pCloud directly, but per-request API calls on every file operation cause UI lag and rate-limit risk under concurrent multi-user load. The rclone background-sync approach keeps Nextcloud fast and treats pCloud purely as a backup target, eliminating the latency coupling entirely.

rclone over Nextcloud External Storage. The native integration is the obvious path; it was rejected specifically because of per-request API latency at the access patterns a video-heavy team generates. Running rclone as a background cron job decouples user-facing responsiveness from the sync layer completely.

Mailcow OAuth over Nextcloud LDAP. LDAP would have required standing up an OpenLDAP or FreeIPA server — a significant additional service to maintain. Mailcow's OAuth2 endpoint was already running and required a single configuration change in Nextcloud to wire in. The SSO pattern, established for mail, extended to Nextcloud and every subsequent internal service for free.

pCloud lifetime license over recurring cloud storage. The $599 Black Friday lifetime license amortises to near-zero over any multi-year horizon versus the $9,585/year SaaS bill it helped replace. At 22 users, the math favoured a one-time purchase decisively; the 25-day payback made the case in one slide.

Results

Google Workspace and LucidLink were fully decommissioned. All 22 team members adopted the Nextcloud desktop client without retraining — the UX is functionally identical to Google Drive Sync. Year 1 net savings: ~₹8.28 L (~$8,921) with full payback in 25 days. Year 2+ recurring savings: ~₹8.84 L/year (~$9,520/year). Adding future team members costs nothing incrementally versus $27/month + ₹864/month per new hire under the old stack. The Mailcow OAuth integration extended the studio's shared identity layer to a second internal service at zero additional infrastructure cost, establishing the pattern every subsequent tool on the Tailscale mesh would follow.