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Hacker News Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead

The 'ultimate open-source' alternative to commercial cloud storage (Dropbox/Google Drive), emphasizing provider agnosticism and 'Bring Your Own Bucket' (BYOB) for S3-compatible storage.

169
Traction Score
138
Discussions
Apr 7, 2026
Launch Date
View Origin Link

Product Positioning & Context

AI Executive Synthesis
The 'ultimate open-source' alternative to commercial cloud storage (Dropbox/Google Drive), emphasizing provider agnosticism and 'Bring Your Own Bucket' (BYOB) for S3-compatible storage.
Locker directly challenges established cloud storage providers by offering an open-source, BYOB solution. This appeals to users and businesses concerned with vendor lock-in, data sovereignty, and recurring subscription costs. The 'provider agnostic' approach, supporting S3, R2, Vercel Blob, and local storage, provides significant flexibility and control over data infrastructure. The inclusion of a 'Virtual file system' and 'QMD Search plugin' indicates a focus on core functionality expected from enterprise-grade file management. This product taps into a market segment prioritizing self-hosting, cost efficiency, and architectural flexibility over managed services, potentially disrupting the lower-end of the enterprise file sync and share market.
Last week SWYX nerd-sniped me into building an Open-source Dropbox.Here is Locker: the ultimate open-source Google Drive/box/Dropbox alternative
- Provider agnostic (S3, R2, vercel blob, local)
- BYOB (Bring your own bucket)
- Virtual file system
- QMD Search plugin
Open-source Dropbox alternative Google Drive alternative Provider agnostic S3 R2 vercel blob local

Related Ecosystem & Alternatives

Discover adjacent products, open-source repositories, and developer tools sharing similar technical architecture.

Deep-Dive FAQs

What is Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead?
Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead is analyzed by our AI as: The 'ultimate open-source' alternative to commercial cloud storage (Dropbox/Google Drive), emphasizing provider agnosticism and 'Bring Your Own Bucket' (BYOB) for S3-compatible storage.. It focuses on Locker directly challenges established cloud storage providers by offering an open-source, BYOB solution. This appeals to users and businesses conc...
Where did Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead originate?
Data for Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead was aggregated directly from the Hacker News community ecosystem, representing raw developer and early-adopter sentiment.
When was Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead publicly launched?
The initial public indexing or launch date for Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead within our tracked developer communities was recorded on April 7, 2026.
How popular is Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead?
Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead has achieved measurable traction, logging over 169 traction score and facilitating 138 recorded discussions or engagements.
Which technical categories define Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead?
Based on metadata extraction, Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead is categorized under topics such as: Open-source, Dropbox alternative, Google Drive alternative, Provider agnostic.
What are some commercial alternatives to Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead?
Our semantic intelligence engine identifies potential commercial alternatives in the SaaS space, such as Databerry, which offers overlapping value propositions.
How does the creator describe Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead?
The original author or development team describes the product as follows: "Last week SWYX nerd-sniped me into building an Open-source Dropbox.Here is Locker: the ultimate open-source Google Drive/box/Dropbox alternative - Provider agnostic (S3, R2, vercel blob, local) - ..."

Community Voice & Feedback

xnx • Apr 7, 2026
Features I'm guessing this is missing (in no particular order): Recycle bin, Sharing with permissions, Editor, Versioning, Search, Partial sync, zone redundancy/backup, Windows, Android, Mac, and iOS clients
carefree-bob • Apr 7, 2026
You can do a lot with cloudflare tunnels and a home mac mini. Dropbox, blogs, homebox (home inventory), hosted git.I'm a kid in a candy store playing around with this stuff.
conradev • Apr 7, 2026
I love it! How would you position yourself relative to existing OSS products in the space like Filestash or Seafile? I'm trying to pick a solution at the moment, and the mobile experience matters a lot to me.
sumeno • Apr 7, 2026
Why wouldn't I trust a vibe coded app that has existed for 1 week with all my important data?
charles_f • Apr 7, 2026
Stop paying for banks, AI built this cardboard box that you can store in your toolshed instead!
ovaistariq • Apr 7, 2026
The critical part of Dropbox is not just the storage layer but a combination of their client and server. Even small things like how do you handle conflicting writes to the same file from multiple threads, matter a great deal for data consistency and durability.
kristianc • Apr 7, 2026
We've officially come full circlehttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
filleokus • Apr 7, 2026
Neat! Pricing wise it might not always make sense though to use the commercial blob storages, especially for solo usage.1 TB is roughly 20-30 USD per month at AWS/GCP only in storage, plus traffic and operations. R2 is slightly cheaper and includes traffic.Compared to e.g a Google AI plan where you get 5 TB storage for the same price (25 USD/month) + Gemini Pro thrown in.
1a527dd5 • Apr 7, 2026
Absolutely not. The value isn't in the cloud storage. The value is in the client (DropBox in my case) seamlessly working across all my devices.
dewey • Apr 7, 2026
The selling point of Dropbox/Google Drive isn't the storage itself, but that there's app for mobile and desktop operating systems which deeply integrates it in the OS so it's just like a local folder that's magically synced.So it's a cool project, but not really what I'd say is a Dropbox replacement.

Discovery Source

Hacker News Hacker News

Aggregated via automated community intelligence tracking.

Tech Stack Dependencies

No direct open-source NPM package mentions detected in the product documentation.

Media Tractions & Mentions

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Deep Research & Science

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