Cloud storage decision
Shade
A small team can build a narrow replacement (uploads, proxies, basic AI tagging and search) over several weeks, but reproducing Shade's enterprise compliance, certifications, polishing (streaming client, multi-mount drives) and managed services is not realistic without significant investment.
Visit website↗$35/mo
$420/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$300/mo20 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 9 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Shade alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Upload media, generate proxies/transcodes, extract metadata (transcript, faces, visual labels), index metadata for search, share for review and collect timestamped comments/approvals.
What it still won’t have
- Enterprise compliance certifications and attested audits (SOC2/ISO/HIPAA/TPN)
- Fully managed enterprise onboarding/data-migration services
- Polished high-performance cloud-to-local streaming client and multi-mount drive UX
- Dedicated account manager, SLA-backed support, and emergency phone support
What remains hard
- Compliance and regulation
SOC II Type 2 Certified
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 9 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a self-hosted minimal media asset manager using Node.js (Express) backend, Postgres metadata DB, S3 for object storage, AWS Elemental MediaConvert or FFmpeg workers for proxy generation, OpenAI/whisper or Google Speech-to-Text for transcription, and Elasticsearch (or Meilisearch) for indexing. In scope: resumable large-file uploads to S3, background job queue for proxy/transcode and metadata extraction, vision and speech inference pipeline that writes structured metadata, a search API with full-text and faceted filters, and a web UI to browse/stream proxies, create shareable collections, and add timestamped review comments with RBAC. Out of scope: enterprise compliance audits, TPN certification, multi-mount local drive client, and paid managed onboarding. Include error handling, retry/backoff for background jobs, basic tests for API endpoints and job workers, and Docker compose for local deployment.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productShade (home)
- official pricingShade Pricing
- official docsManaging product content at scale - Shade
- open sourcemanyfold3d/manyfold
- open sourcecloudreve/cloudreve
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
