How we compare

Jacks Garden sits between two worlds: the all-in-one clouds most people rent from Big Tech, and the growing crop of hosts that run open-source apps for you. Here's how it stacks up against each.

vs the big clouds

iCloud, Google One, Dropbox — one company's bundle, where convenience is traded for your data. The garden swaps it for open-source apps that do the same jobs and stay yours.

iCloud · Google One · Dropbox

Jacks Garden

What you get

One company's bundle — Drive, Photos, Mail — built to keep you inside it.

A catalog of open-source apps — Nextcloud, Immich, Vaultwarden and more — each a real alternative you actually run.

Your data

Sits on their platform under their terms, scanned to train models and aim ads.

Lives on your own instance. Never scanned, never sold — export or delete the lot whenever you want.

Leaving

Proprietary formats and one-way doors make moving out a project in itself.

Open-source apps and standard formats. Download everything and walk away — no permission needed.

Who runs it

Hyperscale data centres you'll never see, governed by whoever owns them.

Small, independent infrastructure we run and answer for ourselves.

What it costs

Each service is its own subscription; the bill grows every time you add one.

One flat price per app and a single storage plan shared across all of them — first app free.

vs other self-hosting platforms

PikaPods, Cloudron, Elestio — good tools that run open-source apps for you too. The difference is that the garden wires them together: one login, one storage plan, backups and updates all handled for you.

PikaPods · Cloudron · Elestio

Jacks Garden

One login

Each app is its own island, with its own account and password to keep.

One identity signs you in to every app you run — single sign-on built in across the garden.

Storage

Sized and billed per app or per pod — a separate quota to juggle for each.

One storage plan shared across every app. Grow it once and they all draw from it.

Backups

Often your job to set up, or a paid add-on you wire together yourself.

Nightly off-site backups on the 3-2-1 rule, included with every app — nothing to configure.

Server & upkeep

From a server you administer to managed pods — several still expect some devops from you.

No server, no Docker, no upgrades to babysit. Fully managed, end to end.

What it costs

Metered by the RAM, CPU and storage each app burns through.

A flat monthly price per app — what the catalog says is what you pay. First app free.

These are all capable tools, and which fits depends on what you want. The garden's bet is on a managed, wired-together set of open-source apps you own — not a server to run, and not a walled garden to be locked into.

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