Running a drawing review service means storing a lot of PDFs and serving those same files repeatedly.
When we built Xenmark, we wanted to keep that part of the infrastructure inexpensive from the start. Lower operating costs give us more room to keep the free plan useful and the paid plans reasonably priced.
A drawing isn’t uploaded once
One reviewer opens it, then another. Pages get revisited. A new revision arrives, and the old one stays part of the review history because the comments raised against it still matter. Deliverables get generated. The project may stay active for weeks.
So the same files are read many times over the life of a project, and how many times isn’t something we can predict per customer. That makes the cost of reading files repeatedly more important to us than the cost of storing them once.
Live files and recovery copies have different jobs
For active project files, Xenmark uses Cloudflare R2. R2 Standard storage currently costs around $0.015 per GB per month, with no Internet egress charges. There are still request costs, but not paying for bandwidth is what keeps repeated access to the same drawings predictable. At current pricing, 1 TB works out at roughly $15 per month.
For selected project-file backups and internal recovery, we use Backblaze B2, currently around $6.95 per TB per month.
We use the two for different things. Active files have to be available immediately and repeatedly while people are working. Recovery copies are rarely read at all; they exist so a failure in the active storage layer isn’t the only thing standing between a customer and their files. For us there wasn’t much reason to force one provider to do both jobs, and keeping recovery data elsewhere means we’re not relying entirely on one service for live files and backups alike.
Storage is only one part of what Xenmark costs to run — there’s still compute, databases, authentication, email, monitoring, and the rest of it — but it matters when PDFs are at the centre of the product.
Keeping our costs low has a practical benefit
The clearest example is participation. Drawing reviews often involve people from several organisations, and we didn’t want every invited reviewer to become another licence somebody has to justify. The person running the project needs a plan; the people invited into that review take part without buying one.
Keeping the marginal cost of another reviewer low makes that much easier for us to support.
We’re not trying to become your archive
Xenmark coordinates a review. It isn’t built to be the permanent home for your project records.
When a project closes, the full archive bundle — every revision deliverable, the comment attachments, and the activity log — can be downloaded and kept in whatever document system you already use. We don’t think you should have to keep paying for Xenmark just because an old project record is trapped inside it.
Finding the right free limits
Our Free plan is conservative today while we learn how people actually use Xenmark. We want to understand how many drawings a small review normally involves, how many revisions build up, how much attachment storage gets used, and which limit becomes restrictive first.
Those limits aren’t permanent. Keeping storage costs low gives us more freedom to adjust them as we get better real-world data. The current figures are in how Xenmark plans and limits work.
The same thinking applies to the paid plans. If a simpler setup performs reliably, we’d rather use it than add cost for its own sake.
Paying more than necessary is bad for business. That applies to the infrastructure we buy, and to the software our customers buy from us.
If you use Xenmark Free on a real drawing review, we’d especially like to hear where the limits start getting in your way.
Questions or feedback: support@xenmark.app