
AeroFS is now free up to 30 users - yurisagalov
https://www.aerofs.com/blog/aerofs-is-now-free-up-to-30-users/
======
chrisdotcode
On 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.

~~~
tnorthcutt
I mostly agree with you, but their first sentence ("Like Dropbox...") relies
on you knowing what Dropbox is. Which, as you pointed out, isn't good enough
for people who don't ;).

~~~
kbenson
I think it can be broken up into three parts. First:

 _Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall._

For many people, that's a sufficient description to get the idea. If not, you
have the second part:

 _File Sync and Share for the enterprise._

Not as descriptive as the first part if you know what Dropbox is, but if you
don't it will at least let you know how to categorize the product and whether
it's something you might remotely be interested in. Finally:

 _Free up to 30 users._

Now they've made sure the next most salient point is given, the next thing you
would most likely want to know. Everything else is something you can dig a
little deeper for, but for the most part you know whether this is something
you want to pursue or not. I think it's brilliant.

------
winter_blue
The 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
I 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
To 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
If 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.

~~~
dingaling
Salary and benefits are an HR cost. As Project manager I don't care about
that.

IT costs are booked to the project or if you are lucky to central licensing
bucket which can aggregate users and obtain a discount. Either way that comes
out of my project bucket which is already besieged by too many expenses.

~~~
dragonwriter
I think you just gave a perfect description of how bureaucratic details
produce microoptimizations that, while beneficial to the individual decision-
maker, are not optimal for the organization.

------
dochtman
I 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
On 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!

~~~
dochtman
I'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
Really? 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.

------
jstalin
I 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.

~~~
xxcode
We use Microsoft OneDrive which is bundled with our office 365 license. Pretty
good. Strongly recommended.

~~~
minot
> 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
Yeah, 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...

------
rdl
This 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.

------
stalcottsmith
Or 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.

------
mercnet
I 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.

------
discardorama
On 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.

~~~
draugadrotten
Take a look at [https://owncloud.org/](https://owncloud.org/) which may fit
your needs

~~~
fapjacks
Please 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
I'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!).

~~~
fapjacks
Unfortunately, it's impossible to reliably reproduce this problem. If you
Google a bit though, you can easily find lots of results for files that
magically disappear[0], and not just during upgrades. We were able to pinpoint
OwnCloud after making a private folder for one of our guest laptops (which we
normally use for interviews and visiting clients, that sort of thing), and
then leaving the laptop disconnected for a few weeks. This was a folder no one
had access to, and files disappeared and then later this state was synced to
the client. It is definitely a problem with OwnCloud.

[0]
[https://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=19138](https://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=19138)

------
Mahn
Perhaps 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?

~~~
bmm6o
You 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.

~~~
eps
> unwinnable lawsuit

To put it bluntly, this is just very naive.

The financial and the resource costs of pursuing a licensing violation in
court are prohibitive. Especially when it's all based on he-said evidence from
a pissed off employee. When BSA/Microsoft do this, it's a publicity stunt with
long-term effects, and because of that they have a budget for that. For
smaller companies (read - everyone else), the only practical option is to
shame violators into compliance.

~~~
bmm6o
It's a small sample, but every instance I'm aware of has worked out in favor
of the rights holder. Are you saying that infringed companies don't usually
pursue the matter, or that they do and are unsuccessful?

------
Fastidious
It 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
We'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

------
impostervt
Are 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.

~~~
senorsmile
[http://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.

~~~
stinos
Been 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

------
insaneirish
Really hoping they implement the storage provider/document picker
functionality in their iOS app.

~~~
avggeek
I 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.

------
proactivesvcs
Shame 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
I'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
Thank 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
Not 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.

------
sashk
Do they still require Java installed?

~~~
yurisagalov
nope.

~~~
aidos
How 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
My 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
The 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
Sorry 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.

------
danudey
I 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).

------
skrowl
Seems like a more professional version of BitTorrent Sync

------
rsobers
Does the data ultimately live upstream on a corporate file server somewhere?
Or is it pure peer-to-peer sync?

~~~
yurisagalov
The 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.

------
room505
None 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
Hey there! Do you mind explaining the use case in a bit more detail?

~~~
room505
In 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
Sounds like architects need a DVCS for CAD files :)

~~~
ska
This is the space things like solidworks EPDM are trying to service.

------
voltagex_
Is this a replacement/competitor for Bittorrent Sync? There was no mention of
the Android client on the site.

------
jbverschoor
Happy user for over 3 years.

------
chrisper
How is this different from OwnCloud?

~~~
fapjacks
OwnCloud eats your files.

~~~
chrisper
How? I have been using it for a while now without any issues.

