Depending on the metrics, the expense of decentralized file storage can be very low or significantly higher than Web2 counterparts.

According to a new report issued by Singaporean venture capital enterprise Foresight Ventures, the expense of decentralized file storage on blockchains similar to Filecoin, Arweave, Swarm, StorJ, and Sia presently ranges from near zero to $4 per terabyte (TB) per month. This is much smaller than traditional Web2 services similar to Amazon Cloud or Microsoft Azure, where prices can range from $16 to $23 per TB of monthly storage.

Still, the report similarly outlines other expenses associated with decentralized storage, similar as data upload fees and retrieval fees, the latter of which can amount to $7 per TB. Some service providers mentioned in the report, similar to Filecoin, only had storage fees, which were also relatively low, while others had all three types of the aforementioned fees.

In addition, analysts at Foresight wrote that blockchain storage quite faces issues similar to “ file loss," “ difficult to retrieve data ” and “ high bandwidth necessaries. ” Pointing to one blockchain, researchers commented:
  

"Price does not account for bandwidth. Some nodes only provide storage services, refuse retrieval."

Despite pricing controversies, data from blockchain analytics firm Messari cited in the report show that the whole storage capacity of the four largest file-storage blockchains raised by 2 year-over-year to 17 million TB at the end of 2022. Filecoin presently has the largest market share at 67, followed by Arweave (19), Sia (8), and Storj (6). While network utilization remains fairly low, the metric among top players has since surged to 3.1 compared to just 0.2 in 2021.

On April 27, Filecoin rolled out the nv19 Lightening and nv20 Thunder network upgrades to upgrade block validation times. As of April, the network has 22.7 million TB of storage capacity and 3,623 storage provider systems.

(ZHIYUAN SUN, Cointelegraph, 2023)