Written by: Lim Yu Qian
Compilation: Deep Tide TechFlow
Guide: The price of decentralized storage is 78.6% cheaper on average than centralized storage. Coingecko compares the prices of major decentralized storage providers and provides data on the cost of 1TB of storage. Filecoin is considered the most affordable decentralized storage provider, while enterprise-grade centralized cloud storage costs much more. The article also mentions the difference in cost of storing large amounts of data and discusses storage options for different scenarios.
On average, decentralized storage is about 78.6% cheaper than centralized storage. That’s because the average monthly fee for 1TB of major decentralized storage is $2.11, compared to $9.88 for the top centralized storage providers on both personal and business plans.
The most expensive decentralized storage costs $0.16/month less than the cheapest centralized storage at 1TB per month. Storj charges the most of the top decentralized storage providers at $4.00, while Google Drive offers the lowest price of the top centralized storage providers at $4.16. Storj charges separately for storage file retrieval, and download bandwidth is $7/TB.
While the price gap may be too small for an individual considering alternatives for personal data storage, for a business or organization the cost difference between centralized and decentralized storage can add up.
In terms of enterprise data storage, centralized storage providers are significantly more expensive than decentralized alternatives, with enterprise-grade centralized storage costing up to 121 times more than enterprise-grade decentralized storage. Popular enterprise cloud storage solution Amazon S3 costs around $23.00 per month for 1TB, which is $22.81 more than top decentralized storage solution Filecoin's $0.19. Filecoin is used by organizations such as the Internet Archive, which runs the Wayback Machine.
How much does 1TB of decentralized storage cost?
Prices for 1TB of decentralized data storage range from $0.19 per month on Filecoin to $4.00 on Storj. In 2023, the average monthly cost of 1TB of decentralized data storage will be $2.11.
This is based on an analysis of the pricing plans of the 5 largest decentralized storage providers Filecoin, Arweave, Sia, Storj and BitTorrent File System (BTFS).
1TB holds approximately 250,000 photos or 500 hours of 1080p HD video. Or, 1TB of storage can hold 17,000 hours of audio files or tens of millions of pages of documents.
1TB is technically equivalent to 1,024 GB, but consumers and sellers often treat it as 1,000GB for convenience.
Best Decentralized Storage Providers Ranked by Price
Protocol Labs' Filecoin is currently the most affordable decentralized storage provider. Filecoin is able to offer lower data storage prices by providing subsidies to ensure attractive block rewards.
Sia, Arweave, and BitTorrent filesystems are mid-range options for decentralized storage solutions. Notably, Arweave offers the option to lock data storage for 200 years with an upfront payment.
Comparing the cost of centralized and decentralized storage backups
To store copies of all existing YouTube videos for the next 100 years, enterprise-grade centralized cloud storage would cost $7.42 to $8.55 billion more than decentralized storage. Assuming the total file size of YouTube videos exceeds 312 PB and prices remain the same, Amazon S3 will charge $8.62 billion, Google Cloud will charge $7.5 billion, Filecoin will charge $71.22 million, and Storj will charge $1.5 billion.
That’s because Google recently updated its inactive account policy, sparking controversy over user-created data on centralized platforms and drawing attention to the need for centralized storage alternatives.
As another example, if you want to save the three most iconic anime "Naruto", "One Piece" and "Detective Conan" for a century in the future, Filecoin only costs $497.04. Arweave, which specializes in decentralized data storage for "forever" preservation, will charge $5,572.08 to store the three anime for 100 years. By comparison, storing Naruto, One Piece, and Detective Conan on Google Drive for a century would cost an additional $10,385.52.
Nonetheless, it is important to note that pricing on decentralized storage networks tends to follow more dynamic calculations and is also affected by fluctuations in the price of decentralized storage tokens.
