Freeshard offers personal cloud servers, called shards, in an EU data center and handles their operation entirely. It represents the middle ground between a spot on someone else’s platform and running your own server at home: your own machine and your own data, without having to manage the administration yourself. Apps can be installed in the browser with a single click: photo management (Immich), document archiving with OCR (Paperless-ngx), password manager (Vaultwarden), file sharing, notes, budget book, recipes, audiobooks, and more. The apps cost nothing extra; only the shard is billed. Updates, backups, and security run in the background, and inactive apps are stopped automatically. A shard is one identity and one place for everything: no account silos, no sync, a real file system instead of app silos. The entire shard, including data and settings, can be exported and migrated to different hardware or another provider; the platform’s source code is publicly viewable, and self-hosting is explicitly permitted by the license. Behind Freeshard is Good For Business UG, a two-person company from Munich. Shards run on IONOS servers in Berlin, and backups are currently stored on Azure Blob Storage in the EU, encrypted on the client side. Pricing starts at €11.25/month incl. VAT, and the 24-hour trial requires no payment details.
Good self-hosted software exists for almost everything, from photo management to password managers. Until now, anyone who didn't want to hand over their data to major platforms had to set up, update, back up, and secure a server themselves. That overwhelms most people. Freeshard solves this: each user gets their own server in the EU, apps run on it with a single click, and Freeshard takes care of updates, backups, and security. Digital sovereignty without the tech hassle.
In five years, having a personal server should be as natural as having an email account—for everyone, not just tech-savvy people. By then, a vibrant ecosystem of community and app developers will have grown around Freeshard, continuously expanding the selection of apps, with all operations hosted by European providers. Throughout this, Freeshard remains a lean, independent company that grows from its own revenues.
