Why the server tools are free, and what pays for them

People who find one of the server tools eventually land on the pricing page, see a single plan that costs nothing, and write to ask what the catch is. Fair question. Here is the whole answer so we can link to it.

What it costs us

Every one of the server tools keeps the heavy data on your side. backupxo streams your dump into your own bucket; we never hold a byte of it. dockxo deploys onto servers you rent; the panel stores a project description and some logs. cronxo keeps job output for a while and then prunes it. adminxo keeps thirty days of metrics, which for a hundred servers is a few hundred megabytes.

What we actually run, for all of them together, is a handful of containers on two rented servers plus a MariaDB and a Redis. The bill is in the low hundreds of dollars a month. It does not grow much with users because the users bring their own servers and their own storage.

What we get

The honest answer is that we built these for ourselves first. clinicxo has paying customers and needs backups, cron jobs and a deploy process that does not involve SSHing into a box at midnight. Those tools exist either way. Publishing them costs a landing page and a registration form.

Having other people use them is how bugs get found. Nobody on a two-person team is going to hit the MySQL 8 PROCESS privilege problem with mysqldump on their own; a user did, within a week of backupxo going public, and now it is handled.

What is not free

Three products charge money, and they are the ones where it would be strange not to.

facetbrowser is a desktop app with cloud sync. Each profile costs real storage and sync bandwidth, and the people who need two hundred profiles are running a business. It is a one-time payment, because we dislike subscriptions for software that runs on your own machine.

orcapayz routes your payments. If it works, it is directly making you money, and the trial is long enough to see that. We would rather be paid by merchants who already know it works than sell a plan to someone who has not seen a payment go through.

clinicxo has monthly plans because clinics expect someone to answer the phone, and that costs hours.

What happens if that changes

If a server tool ever gets a paid tier, the free plan stays, the announcement goes out at least thirty days ahead, and anything you already set up keeps working. We have written that into the dockxo terms so it is not just a blog post.