Infrastructure rent · Why now blog
Why not just rent the server?
You could run our OS on a rented cloud server. We would rather you did not. The same machine costs about €23,000 to rent for three years and about €2,600 to own, electricity included.
Three years. One very expensive rental.
Take one ordinary server: enough memory for a team’s everyday work, 2 TB of fast storage for the apps and 8 TB of slower storage for files and media. Run it all day, every day, for three years.
Rent that from the cloud, with the discount you get for committing to three years, and the bill is about €23,000. Buy a small machine with the same storage, put it on a shelf and pay the electricity, and it is about €2,600. Nine times less.
Same capacity on both sides: a 16-core server with 32 GB of memory, 2 TB of fast SSD and 8 TB of bulk storage, on all day. AWS list prices with the three-year discount, September 2026. Backups, internet and upkeep are extra on both sides.
Nothing in that comparison is exotic. That is the point. A steady, predictable workload is exactly what renting is worst at, because you pay for flexibility you never use. And it is why we build an appliance and not just a cloud image: the point of saving you money is to save it, not to move the bill to another provider.
The disks are the bill.
Most people expect the server itself to be the expensive part. It is not. In this example the rented disks alone are about €17,000 of the €23,000. You pay for the same 10 TB again every month, for 36 months, long after you could have bought those disks several times over.
There are cheaper cloud storage tiers, and they do bring the bill down to somewhere around €15,000. They are also slower or need the apps to be built for them. The cheap version of renting is still six times the price of owning.
The local machine, meanwhile, uses about €46 of electricity a year. Less than the cloud bill for a single week.
Rent the spikes. Own the everyday.
The cloud is good at what it was built for: sudden bursts of traffic, off-site backups, a place to fail over to. There you pay for flexibility you use.
Team files, a website and internal tools are the opposite. Steady, predictable, always on. That is the part worth owning. OurGrove starts with the machine you own and makes it useful: the catalogue gets the apps onto it, the OS keeps it updated and recoverable.
What does your cloud bill look like? Send it, we will compare ↗
How we calculated it
Worked example prepared 18 September 2026. Cloud side: an AWS c7i.4xlarge in us-east-1 (16 vCPUs, 32 GiB), 2,048 GB gp3 SSD and 8,192 GB st1 bulk storage, running 24/7 for three years, compute at the three-year discounted rate, converted at the ECB rate of 17 September 2026. Total €22,794, of which storage €16,697. At on-demand compute rates the total is €32,948; with colder storage tiers about €15,100 to €17,100.
Local side: a €2,500 machine with the same usable storage after mirroring, plus electricity modelled at 10 W idle and 80 W peak, about €46 a year at €0.30/kWh. Total €2,637.
Both sides leave out backups, internet, support, repairs and tax. This is a capacity comparison, not a measured performance match, and not an announced Grove price.
OurGrove is in beta. We’re preparing for first pilots.