One cost, for everything.

When you host your digital tools with us, one of the biggest benefits is predictable cost. In other words, you always know what you’ll pay each month. There are no surprise bills or hidden fees creeping up on you. How is this possible? The secret lies in how Yundera is built and how it shares resources among users. We’ve written this article in two parts – the first part explains predictable cost in simple, everyday terms, and the second part dives into the technical details for those who are curious about what’s happening under the hood.

But the most important thing to remember is that : Because we use standard open-source platforms, you can always export your data, backup your entire server, and move to a different host if you ever choose to.  So we have to keep our prices steady, and low.

Part 1, simply put : How we built this safely, for you.

What Does “Predictable Cost” Mean? Imagine never getting an unexpected charge on your cloud hosting bill. Predictable cost means Yundera’s pricing is clear and stable, so you know exactly what you’re paying for ahead of time. Many traditional cloud providers charge based on usage (for example, every hour of CPU time or every gigabyte of data transferred), which can make costs fluctuate wildly. Yundera takes a different approach: you pay a flat rate for the resources you need, and that’s it. If you need more power or storage, you’ll pay a known fixed amount for those upgrades – no mystery surcharges. This way, there are no nasty surprises at the end of the month. It’s a lot like an all-inclusive plan for your cloud server, instead of a pay-as-you-go phone bill that can spike unexpectedly.

Shared Infrastructure = Shared Costs: How can Yundera offer such steady prices? The answer is by using shared infrastructure cleverly. Yundera runs on large, powerful physical servers (called bare-metal servers) provided by Scaleway, a European cloud provider. Think of a bare-metal server as a big computer in a datacenter. Instead of giving each customer their own small server (which would be costly), Yundera hosts many customers on these big machines, isolating everyone’s environment but letting them share the hardware. It’s a bit like an apartment building: instead of each person paying to live in a separate house, many people share one large building, which is more efficient. By sharing the bare-metal servers among multiple users, the overall hardware cost is split between everyone. This means each person pays less than if they had an entire server all to themselves. More users joining Yundera actually helps lower the price per person, because the cost of those hefty servers is spread out more widely. In real-world terms, it’s like carpooling for cloud hosting – everyone chips in for gas, so each rider spends less than if they drove separately.

Economy of Scale – More Users, Lower Prices: As the Yundera community grows, we gain economies of scale. In simple terms, buying in bulk is cheaper. Yundera can add more high-capacity servers to its cluster as more people sign up, and larger servers often give more computing power for the money (just like buying a giant pack of goods wholesale is cheaper per item). We pass those savings on to our users. For example, our storage pricing is based on market cost of drives and will drop as we grow – right now cloud storage on Yundera costs about €6 per terabyte, but we aim to push that down to around €1 per TB as more users join. In other words, the more people use Yundera, the better deals we can get on hardware, and the cheaper it becomes for everyone. This community-driven cost reduction keeps prices stable or even trending downward, so you can count on affordable hosting long-term rather than worrying about price hikes.

Transparent, Flat Pricing (No Surprises): Yundera’s pricing model is straightforward. There’s a base plan that includes everything you need to run your private cloud server – your own domain name, security configuration, a suite of pre-installed apps, and unlimited user accounts for your server. This base server runs on a shared machine with ample power (our standard server is on a host with 96 GB RAM, and 18 TB storage, so it’s quite robust). Because it’s shared, you benefit from the power of a big machine without bearing the full cost. If you ever need more resources – say more processing power, more memory, or extra storage – you can scale up by simply adding what you need at fixed rates (for example, a couple euros for an extra CPU core, or a euro for more RAM). These add-on costs are clearly posted and won’t change unexpectedly. You only pay more if you decide to upgrade your server’s specs, and even then you’ll know the exact price beforehand. This means you can plan your budget with confidence, and your monthly bill will be predictable every time. No surprise overage fees, no “premium support” add-ons, and no paying for things you don’t use – just one clean, transparent bill.

And the most important : No Lock-In – Your Data, Your Freedom: One more thing that keeps your experience cost-effective and stress-free is Yundera’s commitment to open-source foundations. All the technology that powers your Yundera server is built on open-source software, which means two important things: (1) there are no expensive license fees baked into the price (unlike some proprietary platforms), and (2) you’re never locked in. 

Because we use standard open-source platforms, you can always export your data, backup your entire server, and move to a different host if you ever choose to. 

Yundera wants you to stay because you love the service, not because we’ve trapped your data. This freedom to leave actually helps keep us honest and our costs competitive – we have to continually earn your business with value, not lock-in tricks. In short, your data is yours, and you’re free to take it wherever you want, whenever you want, with no penalties. Predictable cost isn’t just about money; it’s also about knowing you have control over your digital life.

Part 2: How Yundera’s Infrastructure Keeps Costs Down (Technical Details)

For the tech-savvy readers, this section explains the backend of Yundera’s cost efficiency in one clear paragraph:

Yundera runs all customer instances on dedicated bare-metal servers leased from Scaleway – these are powerful physical machines in a European datacenter that form the backbone of Yundera’s cloud. On each bare-metal server, Yundera uses Proxmox Virtual Environment as the virtualization layer to orchestrate multiple virtual machines (VMs) on the same hardware. In practice, when you use Yundera, you are running inside a VM managed by Proxmox, which efficiently allocates a portion of the server’s CPU, RAM, and storage to you. All the VMs across Yundera’s servers share a unified storage system powered by Ceph (an open-source distributed storage platform). Ceph aggregates the disks of all these servers into one redundant storage pool, automatically replicating data across different machines to provide fault tolerance and high availability. This means if one server goes down, your data and services are still safe and running on the others. By choosing large bare-metal servers (for example, a host with 128 CPU cores and large amounts of RAM and disk space) and splitting them into many VMs, Yundera achieves significant cost efficiency. Bigger servers generally offer better price-per-resource ratios, so a high-end machine divided among, say, 20 users ends up cheaper per user than 20 separate smaller machines. There are also fewer overhead costs – one big server uses less power and requires less management than many small ones. Thanks to this design, Yundera can scale horizontally: as more users join, new bare-metal servers are added to the cluster and seamlessly integrated using Proxmox and Ceph (with no downtime). This scalability keeps performance high while maintaining stable pricing at scale – we’re essentially extending the same efficient cost-sharing model to more users without degrading service. Importantly, because everything runs on open-source software (Proxmox for VMs, Ceph for storage, and other open tools), there are no proprietary constraints or licensing fees driving up costs. Yundera’s customers retain full ownership of their environments and data, which can be exported or migrated at any time. 

Moreover we added CasaOS main interface, open source that allows you to check easily all your installed Open source apps, in a click.

In summary, the combination of bare-metal power, smart open-source virtualization, and economies of scale is how Yundera keeps cloud costs predictable, low, and fair for both casual users and tech enthusiasts alike.