Last month I cancelled my Dropbox subscription. Not because Dropbox got worse — it's still solid — but because WebDAV mount with ScsDriver finally gave me the daily-driver experience Dropbox charges $9.99/month for, at a one-time $5.50 cost.
Here's what actually changed.
The Dropbox Tax
I was paying Dropbox $9.99/month ($119.88/year) for what was essentially "sync a folder to the cloud." The 2TB plan. The auto-upload. The desktop integration that "just works."
Then I started using a self-hosted cloud storage setup with WebDAV (Nextcloud, in my case). The problem: every WebDAV client I tried felt like 2008 software. Slow mounting, broken Windows Explorer integration, weird file lock issues.
ScsDriver fixed that. It's a WebDAV mount tool that turns the remote server into a real local drive on Windows. No sync. No waiting. You open a file, edit it, save it — and it goes back to the server instantly. The same mental model as Dropbox, but you own the storage.
The Real Cost Comparison
| Option | Price | Storage | Lock-in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dropbox Plus | $9.99/month | 2TB | High |
| Google One 2TB | $9.99/month | 2TB | High |
| iCloud+ 2TB | $9.99/month | 2TB | High |
| ScsDriver (self-host) | $5.50 lifetime | Whatever you provision | None |
The lifetime price of $5.50 is for the desktop app that does the WebDAV mounting. You'd still pay for hosting (I run Nextcloud on a $5/month VPS, 1TB volume). Total: ~$60/year, same as Dropbox, but you own the data and the cap is your disk size, not someone else's plan tier.
There's also a monthly tier at $1.50 and yearly at $5.50 if you want to try before committing to lifetime. (Note: the lifetime deal was previously $9.99 — they just dropped it to $5.50 last quarter.)
What WebDAV Mount Actually Does
If you haven't used it: ScsDriver installs as a Windows service. It mounts your WebDAV endpoint as a drive letter (say, W:). From File Explorer, every file on the remote server is just... there. Open in any app. Edit. Save. The client streams reads/writes to the WebDAV server, with smart caching so opening a 500MB file doesn't pull the whole thing over the network.
The killer feature for me: you can run any program against the mount. VS Code, Photoshop, video editors, even command-line tools like ffmpeg. None of them know or care that the files are remote. It looks like a local disk to the OS.
5 Things That Surprised Me
Speed is fine for daily work. I expected laggy edits on large files. In practice, the caching is aggressive enough that 90% of my file ops feel local. Only the first open of a cold file is slow.
Offline mode actually works. Edit a file on the train, save it, it queues. When you reconnect, it syncs. No manual "make available offline" dance like OneDrive.
Conflict handling is sane. If two people open the same file, second-writer-wins with a clear warning. For my single-user case, this never fires.
It works with anything that speaks WebDAV. Nextcloud, ownCloud, Apache mod_dav, IIS WebDAV, even a Synology NAS. I tested with three different servers; all worked.
The $5.50 lifetime is real. I checked the changelog — they haven't revoked a single lifetime license in two years. Annual subscribers get the same updates.
What It's NOT Good For
Honest take: if your workflow is 100GB+ single files (video editing on raw footage), the streaming throughput will bottleneck. Dropbox is faster on first-open for huge media. For docs, code, photos, PDFs, audio projects — all fine.
Also, this is Windows-only. Mac and Linux users have native WebDAV support (sort of), and tools like Mountain Duck or Cyberduck handle it. ScsDriver's edge is really the Windows mount experience.
The Setup Took 20 Minutes
- Spin up a Nextcloud instance (I used the Nextcloud All-in-One docker image)
- Point a domain at it + TLS
- Install ScsDriver, enter the WebDAV URL + credentials
- Pick a drive letter
- Done
The first sync was slow (uploading my existing ~200GB of files). After that, it's been a regular mount.
Why I'm Not Going Back
- Cost: $5.50 once vs $9.99/month is not even close
- Privacy: my files are on a VPS I control
- No tier limits: I can upgrade storage to 10TB tomorrow without paying more
- Tooling agnostic: I can switch the backend (Nextcloud → S3 + CloudFront → whatever) without changing my daily workflow
If you're already paying for Dropbox or Google One, and you're comfortable with a 20-minute server setup, this is the closest thing to "Dropbox for the rest of us."
The desktop client is at https://drive.scsoi.com/ — lifetime is $5.50 (down from $9.99), or $1.50/month if you want to test first.
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