Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead

Why wouldn't I trust a vibe coded app that has existed for 1 week with all my important data?

The selling point of Dropbox/Google Drive isn't the storage itself, but that there's app for mobile and desktop operating systems which deeply integrates it in the OS so it's just like a local folder that's magically synced.

So it's a cool project, but not really what I'd say is a Dropbox replacement.

Stop paying for banks, AI built this cardboard box that you can store in your toolshed instead!

We've officially come full circle

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676174

Dropbox is a lot more than file storage. The syncing itself has been through serious tests to characterise its behaviour. Sure, some may not like the decisions taken to direct its sync behaviour one way or another but at least all these are known through formal testing.

The critical part of Dropbox is not just the storage layer but a combination of their client and server. Even small things like how do you handle conflicting writes to the same file from multiple threads, matter a great deal for data consistency and durability.

Neat! Pricing wise it might not always make sense though to use the commercial blob storages, especially for solo usage.

1 TB is roughly 20-30 USD per month at AWS/GCP only in storage, plus traffic and operations. R2 is slightly cheaper and includes traffic.

Compared to e.g a Google AI plan where you get 5 TB storage for the same price (25 USD/month) + Gemini Pro thrown in.

Absolutely not. The value isn't in the cloud storage. The value is in the client (DropBox in my case) seamlessly working across all my devices.

Feels like this is missing some of the key points of using generic bucket storage for me: 1. Archive pricing for really large old documents. 2. Cross-provider backups; especially for critical documents.

Why would I want to replace my reliance on them with reliance on Amazon or another cloud provider?

I'd rather control the whole stack, even if it means deploying my own hardware to one or more redundant, off-site locations.

Edit: Are there robust, open source, self-hosted, S3-compliant engines out there reliable and performant enough to be the backend for this?

Why does getting started have me sign up for an account vs take me to the docs to self host?

I pay Dropbox $120 per year for 2TB. No transfer fees, solid Apps, macOS integration, free APIs.

How much on S3? A LOT more.

Looks great!

Feature request: Google Drive for desktop.

That is the feature that gives your drive as a mounted file system that stream files as you need them.

It gives me the ease of having access to a giant amount of files stored in my gdrive without having to worry about the space they take up locally nor moving files up and down.

Actually, what solutions to that might already exist? I don't really use the web UI of gdrive as much as use it as a cloud disk drive.

Why would I use S3 when S3 is super expensive compared to all other cloud storages?

Ok, I'll see it later but please use the 'Release' feature of GitHub. It is the easiest way to tell for your customers that a new release is out. Even GH can send notifications. Thanks.

I used to be excited by these kind of tools, I love to self-host stuff. When I clicked on the link, I had this hesitation, suspecting "maybe it's LLM generated". And sure enough, coming back to HN, description says it is.

File sync can't be that hard! Enters the first 3 way conflict and everything explodes.

Dont misunderstand me, this is a cool idea. But if your rotation time between ideating a project and pushing it to HN is a week, you don't understand the problem space. You didn't go through the pain of realizing its complexity. You didn't test things properly with your own data, lost a bunch of it and fixed the issues, or realized it was a bad idea and abandoned it. I have no guarantee you'll still be there in a month to patch any vulnerabilities.

Not that any open-source project had these kind of guarantees until now, but the effort invested in them to get to that point was at least a secondary indicator about who built it, their dedication, and their understanding of the space.

I already do this with next cloud and s3, I've never once had an issue in many years

Spme things should not be vibecoded (yet)

May I recommend the excellent https://s3drive.app/ which is compatible with S3 and also providers like Proton Drive

Cross compatibility and easy of use is as important as price and open source

Looks like a good light weight solution to front object storage with a front end and auth. One suggestion is to add the license to the repo. The readme says License: MIT, but there’s no license file.

But isn’t Syncthing already open source Dropbox? Can easily use own hardware too which is very nice.

I bought 35$/mo 16TB server from OVH. I am running 2 replicas of Garage, one on this server. I am using this for backup for now but probably I will also move my Nextcloud files there and websites. This is fine for now and less pricey than any S3 provider I was able to find.

I'd love a local offline alternative, maybe I'll get AI to build it for me

Very cool idea, but without background file syncing from/to my local machine, it can't replace my cloud storage provider.

I wonder if it would be possible to do something like this that had transparent end-to-end encryption.

That is a bit like saying “Don’t use a medical analysis app, just interpret your lab results yourself.”

Sure, ChatGPT can help, but to use it reliably, you still need enough medical knowledge to ask good questions and evaluate the answers.

Why not just use an FTP server?

What happens if the server disappears permanently and only the bucket is up?

Just don't spin up your machines in Bahrain or the UAE...

Another option is https://github.com/drakkan/sftpgo

This is in Go, exposes both webdav and SFTP servers, with user and admin web interfaces. You can configure remotes, then compose user space from various locations for each user, some could be local, others remote.

"Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, pay for an S3 bucket instead"

I use archive storage class on google cloud, to store old movies and wedding videos, pictures of old vacations.

For everything else I use paid onedrive subscription. The biggest problem is user interface with s3 like storage and predictable pricing because remember you also pay for data retrieval and other storage apis, with dropbox etc you pay a fixed amount. Every year or so I roll over data into the bucket.

But for infrequently accessed data its fine.

S3 is costly and carries significant political baggage.

For a better alternative, run MinIO on a cloud provider of your choice, or stick with a secure option like Proton Drive.

Stop paying for clothes, make your own instead!

this is rlly cool

See also: https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS

Doesn’t require an external database (just a s3 bucket) and is a single binary. A webui is shipping in the next few days.

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