Free alternative to AWS S3, GCP Storage for Object Storage, backed by Google

If you are one of those founder/co-founder who is bootstrapping his/her startup and looking for ways to save $$. This is must read for you guys, it’s from my own experience at SnapHomework App.

Freemium Model….

SnapHomework App has freemium model, where we offer the app itself as free to schools with basic set of features such as classroom updates and school notices, which includes uploading videos, images, audio or any document. And then premium customers get access to additional features like conducting online classes through zoom or google meet, assignments, conduct tests, collect school fee or exam fees.

For Free use Free…

One of the major cost component of SnapHomework total cost was the Storage Cost and as schools upload lot of videos and images, which is seen by parents/students and hence both storage and bandwidth cost. For Premium it makes sense to have storage service like GCP or AWS S3 but we wanted a solution that is equally good but FREE.

Then one fine day, during our regular morning meetings i asked the team how about we let user use their own Google Drive, as we do all the time upload files/videos/images and share them with our friends and family. Voila!! That’s it…Google Drive, if we can integrate Google drive in such a way that user link their own google drive so that all their data is uploaded there, we can save a lot of money we were spending on storage.

Google Drive..

The solution was always there available, just that we didn’t looked carefully. It took us some time to get approval from Google but eventually we were able to integrate it and it worked fine. And all our Free schools/users adopted the change without any challenge as it was google drive, there was no issues with speed and security and we did not have convince them for the adoption.

So if are you looking for Free object storage solution, i highly recommend integrating Google drive in your product.