02 Applications we run for you
Nextcloud
Files, calendars, documents and calls on a machine in Stockholm — the answer that does not need a transfer-impact assessment.
- Role
- Files & collaboration
- Licence
- AGPL v3
- Since
- 2016
- Upstream
- Project site ↗
Nextcloud is the piece of our stack that non-technical colleagues actually touch every day: the shared drive, the calendar, the address book, the document two people are editing, and the video call.
Why we still choose it
Because most of an organisation’s sensitive data does not sit in the database the engineers worry about — it sits in the shared drive. Personnel files, board packs, contracts. When a procurement questionnaire or a works council asks where that material lives, “a disk in Stockholm, at a company incorporated in Sweden” is a much shorter answer than a transfer-impact assessment.
It is also one system rather than four subscriptions, and storage costs what storage costs rather than what a per-user tier costs.
How we run it
On NixOS with PostgreSQL and Redis — never SQLite, which is the single most common cause of “Nextcloud is slow”. File blobs go to S3-compatible object storage at a European provider so storage grows without resizing disks. Collabora or OnlyOffice runs alongside for co-editing that stays inside the perimeter. SSO against your directory, enforced 2FA, per-device revocation.
The honest limit
It is not Google Workspace. Co-editing is good but not as polished, and full-text search across a very large corpus is adequate rather than excellent. Run properly on hardware that matches the user count it is entirely pleasant; run on the cheapest possible VPS to save forty euro a month, it will make you unpopular.