bewCloud is a self-hosted cloud for files, calendars and contacts, built from scratch in TypeScript and Deno as a deliberately simpler alternative to Nextcloud and ownCloud. The author’s complaint is specific and measurable: Nextcloud’s PHP codebase is huge and its CPU and memory footprint is heavy even when idle, so bewCloud keeps its own stack to three small containers and a plain filesystem directory.

What it does

• File manager with search, grid and list views, trash, and a WebDAV URL shown in the UI so existing clients can mount the same storage
• Public file sharing via a link, the simplest way to hand a file to someone outside the server
• Notes, Photos, News feeds and an Expenses tracker with envelopes as first-class modules rather than plugins
• Calendar and Contacts clients talking to a bundled Radicale server over CalDAV and CardDAV
• Shared directories between accounts through symlinks in the data directory, so two users see the same folder under different names
• Companion desktop sync app and mobile app in their own repositories
• Signups switchable off, with the first account to register becoming the administrator

Running it

The documented install is a Compose stack of ghcr.io/bewcloud/bewcloud, postgres:18.6 and tomsquest/docker-radicale, each capped at 256 MB of memory, with data-files and data-radicale bind-mounted from the host. Configuration moved in version 2 from environment variables to a bewcloud.config.ts file, while .env now holds only secrets. The first start needs make migrate-db inside the website container, and the app comes up on port 8000. If Docker is not your thing there is a community NixOS module and a community Helm chart.

Who it is for

People who want their own Google Drive replacement on a small server or a NAS and would rather run three containers than tune a platform. It is a young project, so treat it as a personal and family cloud rather than a drop-in enterprise migration: the internal sharing model is symlinks, not per-file permissions. If you need the full app ecosystem, Nextcloud and ownCloud stay the safer choices, and Seafile is the lighter-weight file sync alternative.