Koofr

Koofr is the least expensive entry in this category and it is unusually plain about what that buys. Koofr d.o.o. is a Slovenian company in Ljubljana, so the contracting party sits inside the EU, while the files themselves are stored in Germany. Paid plans start at 0.5 EUR a month for 25GB when billed yearly, with 22% Slovenian VAT already included in the figure, and the free tier is 10GB with no expiry attached to it.

The chain behind that storage is shorter on detail than the ones HiDrive and Jottacloud publish.

The German data centres are ISO 27001-certified and they belong to a third party Koofr does not name, so a buyer who needs to know which operator holds the disks has to ask rather than read.

Koofr itself lists no certification of its own, which is a different thing from the certification of the building its servers stand in: the first is an audit of how the company runs the service, the second is an audit of the premises. Nor does Koofr publish a founding year on its own pages, so the track record has to be taken on other evidence.

What Koofr does commit to in writing is restraint. It states that it does not track activity and does not scan stored files, and its client-side encrypted Vault is published on GitHub under the MIT licence, so the part that does the encrypting can be read.

The rest of the service is closed source. That makes Koofr a reasonable everyday drive for someone whose requirement is an EU company, German storage and a published price, and the wrong choice for anyone who has to document exactly whose hardware their data sits on.

What Koofr does well

• Slovenian company inside the EU, with the files stored in Germany
• Cheapest paid entry here: 25GB from 0.5 EUR a month, billed yearly, VAT included
• 10GB free forever rather than a time-limited trial
• Client-side encrypted Vault published on GitHub under the MIT licence
• States that it does not track activity and does not scan stored files

Where Koofr falls short

• The German data centres belong to a third party Koofr does not name
• The ISO 27001 certification is the data centres' — Koofr lists none of its own
• Closed source apart from the Vault, so the rest of the implementation is a claim
• No founding year published on its own pages, so the company's age cannot be checked there

Standout feature. At 0.5 EUR a month for 25GB, Koofr is the cheapest way here to put files with an EU company in German data centres, with the encrypting part of the client published under the MIT licence.