This page is designed to help you find out whether Freeshard is good and if it is the right choice for you.
Freeshard provides personal cloud servers, called Shards, running in an EU data centre and fully managed by Freeshard. It is the middle ground between renting space on someone else's platform and running a home server: each user gets their own machine and their own data, without becoming its administrator.
Apps install from a browser in one click: photo management (Immich), a document archive with OCR (Paperless-ngx), a password manager (Vaultwarden), file sharing, notes, budgeting, recipes, audiobooks and more. Apps cost nothing extra; only the Shard is billed. Updates, backups and security run in the background, and inactive apps are stopped automatically so a small Shard goes a long way.
A Shard is one identity and one place for everything: no account silos, no sync, a real file system rather than app-shaped boxes. An entire Shard, data and settings included, can be exported and run on other hardware or at another provider; the platform's source code is public, and self-hosting it is explicitly permitted by its licence.
Freeshard is built by Good For Business UG, a two-person company in Munich, Germany. Shards run on IONOS servers in Berlin, Germany; backups are currently stored on Azure Blob Storage in the EU, encrypted client-side before upload. Prices start at €11.25/month including VAT, and a 24-hour trial needs no payment details.
Listed in
Python and FastAPI for the software on each server and for the control plane, PostgreSQL, Docker for every app, Traefik as the reverse proxy, Vue and plain JavaScript for the web interfaces, Astro for the website. Servers run on IONOS in Berlin.
Freeshard gives each person a whole server of their own instead of an account on a shared platform, and runs it for them. Apps install in one click from the browser; updates, backups and security run in the background. The server sits in Berlin, Germany, operated by a German company, and its code is public.
Compared with Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud, the data lives on a machine that belongs to one person, in the EU, under German law. Compared with self-hosting platforms like YunoHost or Cloudron, there is no server to rent, set up or maintain: Freeshard does that part. Compared with hosted Nextcloud, a Shard runs many independent apps (Immich, Paperless-ngx, Vaultwarden and more) at no extra cost per app. And there is no lock-in: a whole Shard can be exported and run elsewhere, and the licence explicitly permits self-hosting the platform.
Privacy-minded private individuals and households, mainly in German-speaking Europe, who want their photos, documents and passwords away from big US platforms but lack the time or skills to run a server themselves.
Freeshard began around 2018 as a project called Portal, at the end of founder Max von Tettenborn's computer science studies. Its roots are his thesis on identity and trust on the web and the question the Snowden revelations raised: who actually owns personal data? The answer was a server for every person. Good self-hosted software exists for almost everything, but setup, updates, backups and security are too much for most people, so Freeshard takes over that part. Good For Business UG was founded in Munich in 2023 to run it, Portal became Freeshard in April 2025, and today it is a bootstrapped team of two.
We have collected here some useful links to help you find out if Freeshard is good.
Check the traffic stats of Freeshard on SimilarWeb. The key metrics to look for are: monthly visits, average visit duration, pages per visit, and traffic by country. Moreoever, check the traffic sources. For example "Direct" traffic is a good sign.
Check the "Domain Rating" of Freeshard on Ahrefs. The domain rating is a measure of the strength of a website's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. It shows the strength of Freeshard's backlink profile compared to the other websites. In most cases a domain rating of 60+ is considered good and 70+ is considered very good.
Check the "Domain Authority" of Freeshard on MOZ. A website's domain authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It is based on a 100-point logarithmic scale, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking. This is another useful metric to check if a website is good.
The latest comments about Freeshard on Reddit. This can help you find out how popualr the product is and what people think about it.
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