How much does it cost to run Outline?

The Outline software is free for anyone, whether you are a server administrator managing the VPN or someone using Outline to access the open internet.

Outline does require access to a cloud server in order to run, though. Server administrators who already have access to a server can install Outline on it for no additional cost. Those without access to a server can get access from a cloud services provider, like DigitalOcean or Amazon Web Services, for about $5 USD per month for 1 terabyte of data transfer allowance — that’s enough to support hundreds of users on a single server.

An example of how you can do the math to determine how much it'd cost to run Outline with your choice cloud provider:

Assuming an average monthly usage of 5 gigabytes of data transfer per user, a plan of $5 USD per month would allow for about 200 concurrent users, making the cost per user just 2.5 cents per month. Note that data transfer used per month per user will vary greatly depending on whether users are doing low or high bandwidth activities, but most cloud providers will flex to accommodate increases in traffic.

In fact, using Outline is completely anonymous to Jigsaw and Google. We do not track your identity or traffic and there's no monetization plan. Instead, we work with our open source community to ensure that we can provide the software at no cost to our users. Learn more about the data we collect here.