Research · what big-file version control costs
Four ways to host a terabyte. One of them has no seats.
Perforce, Diversion and Git LFS are the three things a team actually chooses between when the files stop being text. This is their published list pricing next to ours, with the arithmetic shown, so you can check it rather than take it. At twenty people it is $113.81 against $790 and $877.50.
The published rates
Everyone charges for two of three things. We charge for one.
There are only three things any of these can bill you for: the people, the bytes at rest, and the bytes on the wire. Perforce charges for people and storage. Diversion charges for people and storage. Git LFS has no seats but charges for storage and transfer, and bills the repository owner for everyone else's downloads, forks and CI included. We charge for storage and transfer, at one rate, and never for people.
Git LFS per-terabyte figures convert its per-GiB rates at 1TB = 931.32 GiB. Diversion Indie is free for the first five users with a five-project cap and eligibility screening; the $35 Studio rate is used here because it is the tier a team of six or more lands on.
The same project, four bills
The gap is not the rate. It is the seats.
One assumption, stated up front: the project is pulled down once during the month, so the bytes moved equal the bytes stored. That assumption favours Perforce and Diversion, because neither of them charges for transfer at all, so every additional pull is free on their bill and metered on ours. The comparison is run on their better case on purpose.
Against Git LFS the difference is a rate difference, and it is real but modest: 19% to 25% less across these three rows, widest on transfer, where $59.90 per TB is 26% under their $81.49. Against Perforce and Diversion it is not a rate difference at all. It is 4.6x to 7.7x, and it comes almost entirely from the seat line, which is why the multiple is biggest for a mid-sized team with lots of people and ordinary storage.
It narrows again at a hundred people with twenty terabytes, where bytes finally dominate the bill on every platform, and that narrowing is the honest shape of it. At that size we are about 2.3x cheaper than Perforce and 18% cheaper than Git LFS, not seven times anything. If you are eight people with half a terabyte and four contractors who need to look at it, the seat line is the whole story and the multiple is enormous.
What does not change when a price does
Four structural things, which are the actual argument.
Reliability
We do not quote an availability number yet.
We could put one here. Every hosted competitor does, and it is the easiest sentence in this article to write. We are not going to, because the vault has not been serving long enough for a rolling figure to mean anything, and a reliability number on a page people buy from is a material claim rather than decoration. There is a live status page at /status instead: ninety days of daily bars and a figure computed from probes that run outside our own infrastructure, because a check running inside the thing it measures reports perfect health during an outage. When it has enough samples the number appears there on its own, and this paragraph gets replaced by it.
What is true today is the thing no hosted competitor can copy, because for them the server is the product: everything except push and pull works with the network off, and your project stays whole on your disk. Open it, search it, read its history, switch versions, keep working. Reads are served from Cloudflare's edge worldwide and cached immutably, so a pull from Auckland is not a round trip to wherever the origin happens to live. An outage upstream is a day you cannot push. It is not a day you cannot work, and it is never a day your files are somewhere you cannot reach.
Check it yourself
One number on the bill, and nothing to install to read it.
$5.99 per 100GB, storage and transfer, billed monthly in arrears, cancel anytime. No seats at any team size. The desktop app, whole-machine search and the ifile CLI are free forever. Every price on this page is a published list rate and every total is derived from the row above it, so the arithmetic is yours to repeat.