What you actually receive on the last day
You receive a folder. Panoramas, the tiles they are served in, any floor plan the tour uses, icons, your logos, the fonts, an entry HTML file and the JavaScript that runs the whole thing. No database, no server-side language, no build step — so it opens from your own web host, from a storage bucket, or from a laptop with the network switched off. There is no account attached to it, which is why there is nothing to renew and nothing to cancel.
The folder
Every tour on our projects page was handed over the same way, as a self-contained folder. The word self-contained is doing real work in that sentence. It means nothing inside the tour is fetched from a service at the moment a visitor opens it — so there is no service that can withdraw it, meter it, rate-limit it or start charging for it later.
- The panoramas
- The 360° photographs themselves, in optimised web format. One per station — one position we shot from, one point in the building you can stand in and turn around.
- The tiles
- Each panorama also cut into smaller pieces at several sizes, so a browser downloads the part you are looking at rather than the whole sphere at full resolution. This is why a tour opens on a phone on a hotel connection instead of stalling.
- Floor plans, if the tour uses one
- The plan itself, plus the position of every panorama on it. Eleven of our twelve published projects have none, because they did not need one. The university building has two, and they track your position as you move.
- The interface assets
- Icons, the arrow graphics, the popup styling, the fonts, your logo. Everything the tour draws on screen travels inside the folder rather than being pulled from somewhere at load time.
- An entry HTML file
- The file a browser opens. Double-click it and the tour runs.
- JavaScript, and the description of your building
- The code that runs the player, and the data it reads: which panorama connects to which, where every arrow sits, what every popup says, what every room is called.
Why “static” is the commercial argument, not a technical detail
A folder with no server-side code has one property that matters more than any of its features: any host can serve it, so no host has leverage over you. That is not an engineering nicety. It is the difference between a supplier relationship you can end and one you cannot. The same files run, unchanged, from all of these:
- Your own web hosting, in a subdirectory beside the rest of your site.
- A storage bucket behind a content delivery network.
- A subdomain we run for you, which is what most of these clients chose — it is €5 per GB of storage a month, and the rate is set out on the pricing page.
- A laptop at a trade stand, with no connection at all.
- A USB stick handed to a colleague, or to a new web agency, or to a procurement file.
Compare that with a package that needs a language runtime. The one published article we could find anywhere in this field that actually explains how to self-host a tour is honest about its own catch, and we respect it for that: the export ships an index.php and a db.php among its files, and it needs shared hosting or a VPS running PHP 7.4 or higher, with XAMPP or MAMP if you want to test it locally. That is still a folder you hold, and it is a real improvement on an embed code. It is not a folder that runs anywhere.
What the folder does not give you
The reason to publish a list like the one above is that it makes the gaps visible too. Here is what you are not buying, stated as plainly as the rest.
- It is not a measured model. Nothing in the tour establishes a dimension, and we do not publish an accuracy figure because we do not have a measured one. Where a distance has to be certain, the answer is a drawn floor plan — €0.60 per square metre, minimum €45 — or a 3D model, which is quoted rather than listed.
- It is not an editor. The folder runs the tour. Whether you also receive the file the tour could be re-edited from is a question we have not answered in writing, and we say so rather than leaving it to be assumed.
- It is not a hosting plan. If you put it on your own server, the uptime is yours and the domain renewal is yours.
- It does not improve on its own. A hosted platform ships player changes to every tour it serves. A folder handed over in March is the same folder in five years. That is the property that makes it durable and the property that makes it static, and they are the same property.
How to check any supplier’s answer in ten minutes
Ask for the artefact, not a description
A link is a hosted page and an embed code is a window onto somebody else’s server. Ask what arrives on the day the job ends, and ask for it as something you can put on a disk.
Open the entry file with the network off
Airplane mode, then double-click it. If the tour runs, everything it needs is inside the folder. A spinner, an error or an empty frame means something is being fetched from a service — and a service is a party to your tour.
Look for files the server has to execute
Search the folder for names ending .php, .py or .rb, or for a package.json. Finding them is not disqualifying. It changes the promise from “any host” to “any host with that runtime”, and you should know which one you were sold.
Move it once, before you need to
Copy the folder to a second location and open it there. The week your website is being rebuilt is the wrong time to discover that a tour only works from the path it was installed to.
What this costs, and what it does not
The folder is not an extra and there is no version of the job that does not end in one. It is what every price on the rate card delivers: €40 for each of the first ten 360° photographs, €30 for each one after, a €160 minimum, with VAT added on top. There is no per-view charge, no seat, no active-space count and no renewal, because there is no account to renew. Hosting on our server is a separate monthly line, at €5 per GB of storage.
| What you get | Where it lives | What it depends on |
|---|---|---|
| The tour folder | Your disk, and any host you choose | A web server that can serve files. Nothing else. |
| Hosting on our subdomain | Our server | Us — and it is a convenience, not the deliverable. The files are yours either way. |
| Analytics wired into the tour | Your own Google Analytics property | Your property. Priced at €0.50 per distinct connection, plus €50 once if you have no property yet. |
| Panoramas published to Street View | Google Maps | Google. Priced at €10 per panorama published, and you choose which ones go. |
Only the first row is the thing you bought. The other three are options, and each one names the party it depends on rather than hiding it.
If you want the number for your own building, send the address and roughly which spaces matter and we will come back with a station count and a fixed price rather than a discovery call. If you would rather check the work first, every tour we have published is live and ungated — no form, no demo booking.
Sources, and when we last checked them
- Lapentor, “How to Run a Self-Hosted Virtual Tour from Lapentor”, published 24 September 2025 Checked August 2026 Lists the exported files as index.php, db.php and four folders, and states the requirement: shared hosting or a VPS running PHP 7.4 or higher, XAMPP or MAMP for a local test.
- Vronos tour files — stations, hotspots and floor plans, counted out of the delivered tours Checked August 2026 Twelve published projects across seventeen tours, 324 stations. Every per-tour figure is published on the project page it was counted from. None of it is estimated.
Questions people ask
- Do I have to host it myself?
- No. Hosting on our subdomain is €5 per GB of storage a month if you want it, and most of the tours on this site run there because that is what those clients chose. The point is not that you must host it. The point is that you can, at any time, without asking us, because you already hold the files.
- How big is the folder?
- We have not published a measured figure and we are not going to guess at one. It scales with the station count, because the panoramas and their tiles are almost all of it. When we publish a real directory listing taken from a delivered job, the byte size will be on it.
- Can I put it on my own domain?
- Yes. Copy the folder into your web root or a subdirectory, point the domain or subdomain at it, and it runs. There is no licence key, no activation, no call back to us and no configuration tied to a particular hostname.
- Will the tour still work in ten years?
- The files will still be there, and a folder of static files does not decay on its own. What can change underneath it is the browser. If a browser or platform change ever breaks something in a delivered tour, we will publish a notice saying what changed, how to check whether you are affected and what to do. Nobody can honestly promise more than that, and a supplier who does is describing a hope.
- What is a station?
- One position the camera stands in — one 360° photograph. Everything you can see and turn around to look at from that spot is one station. It is also the unit we price by: €40 for each of the first ten, €30 for each one after, with a €160 minimum, because four stations is the smallest tour we build.
