FileMaker Hosting for 1 to 4 users
You may know that Claris itself only offers 5 seats or more for their Claris Cloud or on-premise hosting. But in the last days FMCloud.fm started listing a personal plan starting at $29 USD per user and months with annual billing.
This is a great way for having a small company with one to four people host their database on a server in a nearby data center. And the price includes the FileMaker license!
Think about it: You could buy a single box of FileMaker Pro for $540 USD to run FileMaker locally or pay $350 per year to host your database on a server with one user and access it from anywhere using FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Go or Web Direct.
Pricing varies by country, by currency and with VAT rates, but to compare let's list a few prices we got:
| Users | Price per month billed annually | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 user with Personal | $29 per month | $350 per year | |
| 2 users with Personal | $29 * 2 | $58 per month | $700 per year |
| 3 users with Personal | $29 * 3 | $87 per month | $1050 per year |
| 4 users with Personal | $29 * 4 | $116 per month | $1400 per year |
| 5 users with Personal | $29 * 5 | $145 per month | $1750 per year |
| 5 users with Standard | $49 + $16.5 * 5 | $132 per month | $1578 per year |
| 5 users with Pro | $59 + $16.5 * 5 | $142 per month | $1698 per year |
| 5 users with Claris Cloud Essential | $21 * 5 | $105 per month | $1260 per year |
| 5 users with Claris Cloud Standard | $43 * 5 | $215 per month | $2580 per year |
Please note that prices listed above can change at any time. You can calculate prices here soon. Currently the form doesn't do personal plan, but that should come in the next days. After picking a country and putting in the number of employees and FileMaker users, you get pricing suggestions. Usually this includes the per user license fee as well as the site license.
There are a few things to note:
- Personal plan for 5 users costs more than Standard plan, but includes Web Direct.
- Claris Cloud is cheaper for 5 users than the 4 users personal plan.
- Standard and Pro plans can be booked without the FileMaker license, so you can bring your own.
The personal plans are limited, that you don't have a full server on your own, but more a shared experience. You can upload and manage up to 5 database files through a FileMaker database from FMCloud. Included is some storage, access via Data API and OData interfaces and access to your backups. Not available is ESS, ODBC/JDBC, a custom domains and you can't get plugins installed on the server, access the admin console or run scripts on the server.
While the higher plans can pick a specific FileMaker version, the personal plan is always on the default version. Since current FileMaker Server supports a few older FileMaker versions, you don't need to update your FileMaker Pro or Go directly. Don't expect FMCloud to install the new FileMaker versions the next day after a release. They may wait a couple of weeks before starting to deploy it widely to clients. There may always be a .1 update to wait for.
If you need more, you can contact FMCloud.fm and they can offer you pro-rated upgrades to higher offerings. Like once you need plugins, full Admin-Console access or more storage, you can move to standard plan.
We welcome the inovation from 1-more-thing in collaboration with Claris to get hosting available to more smaller companies. Anyone till using peer to peer sharing in FileMaker Pro should now think about signing up here to get basic things like backups and access from anywhere. I am curious whether Claris itself or some other vendor replicates this in the next years.