I’m a happy Syncloud user, and I’ve been using FREE Syncloud account for more than 3 years…
I have a domain like [name].syncloud.it…
But, suddenly, with no prior notice, today I received this email, that seems to say that I no longer have a free account, but a trial account:
“Syncloud free trial expires in 30 days Hello, Thank you for trying Syncloud. We strive to improve our product and rely purely on subscriptions to make that happen. You have 30 days on the free plan to decide if Syncloud works for you. Subscribe today to keep using Syncloud after your free trial expires. Click here to activate your subscription: Syncloud Thank you for choosing Syncloud!”
Sorry but this is the prior notice telling that we are not able to cover ever rising DNS bill and unfortunately I have to pay for it.
Last few months probably after adding more apps and more users amazon route53 bill got to a point where I have two options either shutdown syncloud.it free domain offering or start charging the users.
I must say there is a difference between producing open source code so everyone can see what is happening (this is not going away) and running it for free.
I really hope if you like what project is producing £5/month will be not too damaging to your budget but it will allow me to concentrate on improving the quality of the platform and adding more apps.
Sorry again if I have not communicated this decision properly to everyone apart from posting a message on our telegram channel.
I am using syncloud only for private purposes and switched to the syncloud.it-Domain using syncloud DNS because of certificate problems. With paying £5/month only for the DNS-feature this makes no sense.
So the thing I have to do is to switch back to custom-DNS with certificate? Does it work better now? Is opening of port 80 still needed?
Hey, I understand the change is not expected.
You can think of “only for the DNS-feature” as you are funding someone who is making it possible for you to have off-cloud experience and it took 10 years of my life and it is still running.
Custom domain is not supported any more I am sorry.
Dear @boris,
I wanted to know how to handle it, when the DNS is removed, so I deactivated the domain for my device. After that when I wanted to login to my device via internal IP I only got the registration page with two confusing options:
Register for a free syncloud domain or choose PREMIUM, where you can enter an own domain.
I thought it should be the opposite way, so the syncloud domain will be PREMIUM and there is the option to manage it with an own DNS. Where is the error in my thoughts?
By the way, £5 a month is for me too much, but I started to donate 1€ monthly to you. I still want to support your idea of syncloud! I hope you’ll find some economic solutions that it will be possible to survive.
Sorry for the confusion, device activation screen is being changed to reflect the fact that there is a mandatory subscription and two options: our domain or your domain.
There is no option to activate the device without Syncloud managing any DNS.
Hmmm… Could you explain what means “[…] after DNS is removed, you need to start maintaining your own DNS”? → I do not get how to handle this (maybe an explanation in one of your Youtube videos could help more people like me?)
Well I am trying to say that the effortless option is to buy the subscription. If you do not want this you can always take the software as it is open source and do what you want it to do for you.
Hi Boris,
can you please give me some hints, how to further operate my box after DNS is removed. I think I have to do the following:
reactivate box with my own domain
get the certificate from letsencrypt for my domain *.mydomain.com
install certificate
update certificate regularly
Can you give me some hints on: which files do I need, how to install certificate resp. activate it on the box
I think updating involves nearly the same steps as activating it.
Especially I am interested if I am wrong in any way or if I forgot something.
Or probably there is an easy way using certbot?!
Best regards
Peter
If you really ready to do anything to not pay us 5 pounds a month please read the code and feel free to do what you like with it, all is here: syncloud · GitHub
To clarify the subscription does not just cover the dns it covers the work to write the code for the platform, adopt and test apps, maintain backwards compatibility, answers questions like this and many more.
