# Paperless-ngx pricing in 2026

> What self-hosting Paperless-ngx yourself costs, and what it costs free or always-on on blitz.cloud, with our own measured numbers.

Web page: https://blitz.cloud/guides/paperless-ngx-pricing/
Updated: 2026-10-18

There's no official hosted version of Paperless-ngx; it's a project you run yourself, not a product someone sells as a service. Document scanners like Evernote or Google Drive do a different job: they store files, but they don't read and file a scanned letter for you the way Paperless-ngx does. On blitz.cloud you can run Paperless-ngx free, with the usual free-plan limits, or keep it awake on Pro so it keeps fetching your scans.

## Self-hosting Paperless-ngx yourself

Paperless-ngx's source is public under the GPL-3.0 licence, free to run for any purpose. What it costs instead: a server you pick and pay for whether you use it or not, a Postgres database and a Redis cache to set up alongside it, HTTPS, and keeping backups and updates current yourself. Losing your backup here means losing your scanned archive, not just a config file.

## Running your own Paperless-ngx on blitz.cloud

You can run Paperless-ngx on blitz.cloud free of charge. The App Store installs it with its own HTTPS address, 5 GB of storage for your documents, and a Postgres database and Redis cache already created and connected. On the free plan it sleeps after 30 minutes without a visit, and while it sleeps it stops fetching documents from your mailbox. It shares your plan's 512 MB memory and 10 GB storage pool with your other apps.

On Pro, 7 EUR a month, you can keep Paperless-ngx awake so it keeps fetching and filing documents without you opening it first.

Our own numbers, measured 2026-09-25, v3.2.1: Paperless-ngx runs in the medium resource size, 256 MB of memory reserved with room to grow to 1 GB. Sitting idle after sign-in it used 694 MiB; a PDF posted to it was read and filed in 5 seconds, peaking at 939 MiB during that work.

## Is it free / does it run 24/7 / do I need a card

**Is Paperless-ngx free?** The software is free either way, for your own use. There's no paid hosted version to compare it to. Running it yourself on blitz.cloud's free plan costs nothing, with the limits above.

**Does it run 24/7?** Self-hosting it yourself does, if your server stays up. On blitz.cloud's free plan it sleeps when nobody visits and stops fetching your mailbox; on Pro it stays awake.

**Do I need a card?** blitz.cloud's free plan needs no card.