Kheeper Is Cheaper

Kheeper is fully compatible with the OCI distribution spec. You can use Kheeper for all your images without making use of our extensions for booting operating system images. But why would anybody do that when there are already so many great registries to choose from?

Because cost. Kheeper is just cheaper.

Kheeper charges $0.03 per GB of storage vs $0.10 for GCP's Artifact Registry or AWS's Elastic Container Registry. For bandwidth, Kheeper is $0.02 per GB vs $0.12 for GCP or $0.09 on AWS.

If you use 1TB of bandwidth a month and have 10TB worth of images stored, your bill on AWS or GCP is around $1100. On Kheeper your bill is $320.

Built on Backblaze

We started out using Google Cloud Storage as our storage provider for blobs. That made sense at the time when our service layer was still running on GCP (we've since migrated to OVH dedicated servers, another cost-saving move). These days we use Backblaze for storage. Without that migration we would have to charge 5x what we do today, and we'd be more expensive than the cloud registries.

Gambling on Unknowns

Docker Hub and GHCR both offer team plans without enforced overage fees. Presently both offerings are cheaper than Kheeper, but it's unknown how long that will last.

GitHub notes that storage and bandwidth are "currently" free and has promised to give at least one month warning when that changes. If GitHub were to start billing for their registry using the same pricing as GitHub packages, overage fees would be $0.25/GB for storage and $0.50 for bandwidth. That could work out to twice as expensive as GCP or AWS.

Docker Hub notes that usage is "subject to fair use" and has a soft-limit of 50GB for a team. Enforcement of that limit has been indefinitely postponed, also with a promise to give ample warning when they choose to begin charging.

Sustainable

Kheeper's cost plus model ensures that we can cover our own bills regardless of how much our customers use. There are no anonymous or free pulls possible with the Kheeper registry and no free tiers. All usage is metered and billed.

This keeps us aligned with our customers' interests. We have no incentive to apply soft-rate limits. We have no need to pressure you to upgrade to a higher tier. Our only incentive is to ensure the registry works well for our customers at any level of usage they need.