Sepal

Sepal Cloud

In the last post I mentioned that we would be offering a hosted version of Sepal. Sepal Cloud will be the same Sepal as the open-source version but where we handle the servers, storage, backups, media management and everything else and let you focus on managing your plant records.

I truly believe in the importance of ex situ conservation and the value of good plant records at botanic gardens. Well-managed plant records shouldn’t be a luxury that only gardens with technical staff or a large software budget can afford. In fact this is exactly the situation that spawned Sepal. Back in 2005 Belize Botanic Gardens didn’t have a budget for plant collection software so I created Bauble. Sepal is the spiritual successor of Bauble.

Because of this, the self-hosted version of Sepal will always be free and open-source. You will always be able to download your database from Sepal Cloud and run it in your self-hosted version of Sepal.

And not only will the self-hosted version of Sepal always be free but also my intention is to keep Sepal Cloud subscriptions reasonably priced. We won’t be offering any region-based discounting since, to be honest, if we hosted it for any cheaper we would be losing money. Sepal does cost money to run and develop but we will do our best to keep Sepal Cloud affordable.

To keep Sepal Cloud subscriptions reasonably priced I’ve had to get creative with the architecture. While this part of Sepal will remain proprietary I will be giving a peek into the internals of Sepal and Sepal Cloud in later, more technical blog posts.

What you get with Sepal Cloud

When you sign up, you pick a name and a subdomain for your garden and you land on something like yourgarden.sepal.app. From there:

  • Your garden is its own database. It isn’t a row in a big shared table with everyone else’s plants, which means your records can be handed back to you as one file whenever you want them.
  • The World Flora Online plant list is already loaded when your garden is created to give your a head start on your taxonomy.
  • Backups run daily and you can download any of them from your settings page.
  • Media storage is included, and how much depends on the plan. Photos of your plants live in the same place as the records about them.
  • Upgrades happen in the background. When we ship a change, your garden gets migrated without you scheduling anything.

What it costs

We’re starting with three plans.

  • Personal is $10 a month and covers 500 accessions and 2 GB of media storage, which suits a private collection.
  • Garden is $40 a month for 3,000 accessions and 10 GB of media storage, and it’s the one most small gardens and nurseries want.
  • Institution is $150 a month for unlimited accessions and 50 GB of media storage.

Paying annually gets you a month free on any of them.

You can sign up and start a generous trial without a credit card. If you need higher limits or a bigger instance, or you want help with a self-hosted setup, email me and we’ll work something out.

No lock-in

All of your data can be exported at any time to CSV. Your settings page has a download button that hands you a zip of your whole database. The app is licensed under the AGPL so you can download the code and run your own version of Sepal. You are free to leave at any time and take your plant records with you.

Your plant records will outlast my company. They should never be hostage to it.

Kind regards,
Brett Adams, CEO