The problem
Renting costs €60 to €120 a month, per person.
That's what a company pays for Microsoft 365, Slack, a CRM, a password manager, file storage, and a handful of other tools. For a team of ten, that's €7,200 to €14,400 a year, every year, and it grows every time you hire.
And none of it is yours. Your files and your customer data sit on someone else's servers, and the price only goes one way.
Nobody pays that because they love it. You pay it because there has been no realistic way out. Until now.
The solution
One box. Everything already on it.
OurGrove is a small box that sits in your office, set up and kept running for you: files, chat and video calls, customer list, documents and passwords, already talking to each other behind one login for the team.
If a small business rents it today, an open-source version can live on this box.
Underneath is the operating system we build, and it works more like a console than a PC. A sealed appliance that just works, updates itself overnight, and puts itself back if an update goes wrong, with nobody administering it. That is what turns a pile of open-source software into something a normal business can actually own and run.
The proof
Open source, proven by governments.
The apps on the box are the ones governments already run. Nextcloud handles files and documents for national governments across Europe. Matrix carries chat for the French state and the German armed forces. Twenty is the CRM the French government runs.
You could run them yourself, and some businesses do. It takes an IT department: installing each piece, connecting them, one login for the team, updates, backups, and fixing it when it breaks. That is the work we packed into the box.
Why now
The hardware finally caught up.
Six or seven years ago this needed a real server: hundreds of watts, tens of thousands of euros, and someone to look after it. Today a mini PC the size of a book does the same work for 10x less, sitting quietly next to the plant on a normal wall socket.
The software grew up too. Apps became easy to package, a whole machine became as manageable as a single app, and one shared login across everything finally works cleanly. The pieces only lined up recently.
How it works
Free to run. Pay only for the extras.
The box is yours, and the operating system and every app on it are free and open source. Buying it is a one-time cost in MacBook Pro territory, exact price when the first ones are ready. It updates itself, with nothing to pay to keep it going.
What we sell sits around that: offsite backups, secure access from anywhere, and a support line with a real person on it. None of it is required, you take only what you want.
No lock-in, for real. The OS is free and the box is yours, so you can run it all yourself forever, or take our backups and support and leave the moment we stop being worth it. Your data comes with you, and nothing switches off.
Get one of the first boxes.
The price we are aiming for: one box, once, for about two years of what you now pay per person. For a team of ten, it earns itself back in months. A few quick questions about your team and what you pay now help us build the first version around real setups.
Put me on the listOr just email info@ourgrove.eu.