the worksheet · june 2026 prices

Rent vs. own

Storage SaaS bills by the seat and the terabyte, forever. The same mounted-drive workflow runs on a box you buy once. Set your numbers; the simulation finds the month the box pays for itself, and says so plainly when it doesn't.

Preload a comparison: Suite managed · Suite BYO · LucidLink Business · Shade Growth · generic S3 bucket

Compare against
Team and library
Video teams generate it whether or not the bill likes it.
Your hardware
Usable space is what's left after your NAS sets some aside for redundancy. Refurb enterprise drives run lower.
NIC + switch port. Off is fine; your existing 1/2.5 GbE still beats a WAN.
On by default; honest self-hosting pays for 3-2-1 too. That's what keeps this fair.
Advanced assumptions
Auto = (today + a year of growth) × 1.25 headroom.

Cumulative cost, 36 months

SaaS, cumulative Self-host, hardware + opex

The receipts: 36-month totals

Receipts show 36-month totals. Payback is a different number: the month the green self-host line crosses below the blue SaaS line on the chart above.

The exit, priced

Nobody prices the exit until they're paying it. JuiceMount's built-in migration tool (the Manager web UI) moves an existing library in for free, and leaving is copying files off an open-format volume, so the exit bill is your bucket provider's egress rate, not a vendor's. Pulling a 20 TB library out:

  • AWS S3$1,741
  • Backblaze B2$0
  • Cloudflare R2$0
  • Wasabi$0

Published egress rates, checked June 2026: B2 free up to 3× what you store, Wasabi under their reasonable-use policy. The clock is physics either way: 20 TB at 1 Gbit/s is about two days of wire time, whoever you're leaving.

Competitor prices fetched 2026-06-11 (re-checked 2026-06) from the public pricing pages linked below.

Sources: LucidLink pricing · Suite pricing · Shade pricing · Backblaze B2 pricing · AWS S3 egress

Hardware estimates are editable defaults, not quotes. JuiceMount is free software; you supply and run the NAS. What this doesn't price: your time, a failed disk being your failed disk, and the vendors' real strengths: managed convenience, support contracts, AI search. The comparison pages name those plainly.