Start your NAS build with this Synology OS alternative, on sale for Black Friday

Unraid has just kicked off its annual Cyber Weekend Sale, offering some serious discounts if you are looking to build or upgrade your home server setup. This is the biggest sale of the season, and it runs now through Cyber Monday, giving you a chance to save up to 25% on perpetual licenses.

If you are just dipping your toes into the homelab world, the Starter license is where you want to look first. This entry point is seeing a solid 20% discount, bringing the one-time price down from $49 to just $39.20.

The Starter license is ideal for smaller setups, maybe a basic Plex media server, a simple backup solution, or just getting your feet wet with virtualization. The main limitation here is the six-device storage limit, but honestly, for a first-time builder, six devices give you plenty of room to play around and get comfortable with the system.

For the power users and those whose homelabs seem to expand constantly, the Unleashed license is definitely the sweet spot. Unraid is offering 25% off the Unleashed license and any corresponding upgrades, knocking the price down significantly to $81.75 from $109.

The biggest draw of the Unleashed tier is that it removes all device count limits, letting you use unlimited storage drives. This is critical if you plan on running massive media arrays, exploring complex ZFS builds, or hosting multiple virtual machines simultaneously. If you want to go all out, the company also offers a Lifetime license for $249, which includes unlimited storage and lifetime updates.

Regardless of which perpetual license you choose, you get access to Unraid’s full suite of features for a year of updates. Unraid also integrates features like VPN and Tailscale for encrypted access, meaning you can connect to your server securely from any device, no matter where you are.

To sweeten the deal further, Unraid is including a $15 merchandise voucher with every license purchase made during the sale period. You likely will not see these discounts again until next holiday season, so if you have been waiting to start your first server or finally upgrade your drive count, now is the time to get this deal online.