Filebase

What Filebase actually is

Filebase is an S3-compatible object storage service that puts decentralized storage networks behind a familiar API. The pitch in its own words is "the world's first object storage platform powered by decentralized networks": you create buckets, use the AWS S3 API with SigV4 signatures and any AWS SDK or S3 client, and behind that interface data is stored across distributed networks rather than in one provider's region. The company was founded in 2019 in Boston by CEO Joshua Noble and COO Zac Cohen, is privately held and small — roughly a handful of employees — and raised about $3.5 million from investors including Multicoin Capital, Version One Ventures and Protocol Labs.

Our editorial take after reading the docs: the Web3 framing is the marketing layer, and the product underneath is a straightforward and aggressively priced object store. If you strip the decentralization story away, Filebase competes with Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2 and Wasabi — cheap storage, free or cheap egress, S3 compatibility — rather than with AWS S3 on features. The decentralized angle adds content addressing (IPFS CIDs per bucket), IPFS pinning and IPNS-based static sites, which matters if you are building NFT platforms, dApps or anything that needs content-addressed delivery; it is largely irrelevant if you just want to park backups cheaply.

The network integrations are worth pinning down because our database row overstates them. Current Filebase material centers on two things: S3-compatible object storage and IPFS (pinning, gateways, sites). Sia integration is documented in Filebase's own pricing blog ($5.99 per month for 1 TB of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth, or $0.0059 per GB when bundled with a paid IPFS subscription). Storj and Arweave claims circulate in older descriptions but do not appear on the current product pages we reviewed — treat those as historical rather than current.

Pricing: what you really pay

Filebase's pricing is the most convincing part of the product, and its documentation page is unusually honest. Storage is $0.015 per GB-month across a single storage class — no storage tiers, no minimum object durations, no minimum object sizes, and no separate line items for encryption, CDN or replication. Egress from S3-compatible object storage buckets is free on every paid plan with no monthly cap (AWS, by Filebase's own comparison, charges roughly $0.09 per GB outbound and $0.023 per GB-month for S3 Standard). Inbound transfers are free, server-side encryption is included, TLS is included, and deletes are free. S3 API operations are metered: Class A (writes, copies, lists) at $4.50 per million, Class B (reads) at $0.36 per million, with 1 million Class A and 10 million Class B operations free monthly.

The plan structure is simple. Free is $0 per month with 5 GB of shared storage, 500 pinned files, 10 GB of IPFS egress, one bucket and rate-limited API and gateway access — no credit card required. Pro is $7.50 per month for 500 GB of storage, unlimited pinned files, 250 GB of IPFS egress, 100 buckets, custom domains and unlimited API requests, with additional storage at $0.015 per GB and additional IPFS bandwidth at $0.015 per GB. Enterprise is custom. The one recurring gotcha: the free-egress benefit does not apply to IPFS. Outbound transfer from IPFS buckets, dedicated gateways, public gateway traffic, bitswap transfer and Filebase Sites traffic is all billable IPFS bandwidth, tracked separately.

Older Filebase pricing tiers (a $20-per-month Starter with 200 GB, larger tiers at $0.12-$0.15 per GB overage) still circulate in third-party material; the current page is the $0/$7.50/Enterprise structure above. Sia storage remains a separate line as noted. Bottom line: for pure S3-style object storage with heavy reads, Filebase's combination of $0.015 per GB-month and zero egress is near the top of the market, and the docs spell out the metering in a way most storage vendors do not.

Performance & infrastructure

Filebase says it runs bare-metal infrastructure operated end-to-end by its own team, with edge caching in front of the decentralized backends to make writes and fetches tolerably fast. Underneath, objects are distributed across participating storage networks; content-addressed buckets expose IPFS CIDs so the same bytes are retrievable via the S3 endpoint or the IPFS network, including trustless gateway responses. The company reports 2 billion-plus files uploaded, more than 100 million daily requests and use by 60,000-plus developers — vendor figures, but they indicate real production volume rather than a science project.

The reliability posture is where honesty requires caution. Filebase's own about page states "Uptime 99%", which is below the 99.9%-class commitments common among centralized object stores, and we found no formal published SLA for the standard tiers (the Enterprise support table mentions uptime commitments, but the terms are not public). There is no region selection in the hyperscaler sense: data placement is network-driven, and Filebase does not publish datacenter locations the way AWS or Exoscale does. Data residency guarantees are therefore not something we can verify — a real constraint for compliance workloads, and the flip side of the "geo-redundant by decentralization" story.

Operationally, the S3 compatibility claim is the reliability feature that matters most day to day: because the API is the AWS S3 API, your tooling, SDKs, lifecycle scripts and migration paths work unchanged, and — as Filebase points out — you can leave without re-architecting. That reversibility is worth more than any storage durability percentage on a marketing page.

Where it falls short

Start with the company itself. A team of a few people running storage infrastructure for production workloads is a concentration risk that no pricing advantage eliminates. Filebase has operated since 2019 and its backers include serious storage-adjacent investors, but due diligence for anything critical should include an exit plan — which, fortunately, S3 compatibility makes cheap.

Second, the 99% uptime statement and absence of a public SLA will not pass most enterprise procurement reviews as written. If your workload needs contractual availability guarantees with credits, you are in Enterprise-quoted territory or you should look at larger providers.

Third, the IPFS bandwidth model is the pricing trap inside the pricing story. Object egress is free; IPFS egress is not — and it covers gateway traffic, bitswap, trustless gateway responses and Sites delivery. A viral IPFS-hosted asset can generate a bill that the "free egress" headline did not prepare you for. The free tier's rate limits (1,000 files pinned in the older policy, 500 on the current page) are another small inconsistency between pages.

Fourth, the feature set is storage, not platform. No compute, no Kubernetes, no databases, and image transformations are the only processing utility in the current plans. Fine for its category — but know what you are buying.

Who should pick this

We would pick Filebase for cost-conscious object storage with heavy read traffic where egress would otherwise dominate the bill: static asset delivery, backup targets, media libraries, NFT and Web3 content that needs IPFS CIDs and pinning, and dApp backends that want S3 tooling without hyperscaler pricing. The free tier is genuinely usable for evaluation and small projects, and teams that already speak S3 will be productive on day one.

We would skip it for regulated workloads needing documented data residency or a contractual SLA, for organizations that need a large vendor's support apparatus, and for workloads dominated by IPFS egress without modeling that bandwidth line. If you need cheap S3 with free egress and you value the option to leave, Filebase is one of our value picks in cloud object storage. For read-heavy static delivery, compare the all-in cost against Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare R2 — Filebase wins when egress volume is high and when IPFS addressing is part of the job.

Key takeaways

• S3-compatible object storage (AWS S3 API, SigV4, any AWS SDK) with IPFS pinning, CIDs, gateways and IPNS sites on top
• Founded 2019 in Boston by Joshua Noble and Zac Cohen; small team, about $3.5M raised (Multicoin Capital, Version One, Protocol Labs)
• Hard to beat on price: $0.015 per GB-month, free object egress on paid plans with no cap, free inbound, free deletes
• Simple plans: free (5 GB, 10 GB IPFS egress, no card) and Pro at $7.50/month for 500 GB and 250 GB IPFS egress
• IPFS bandwidth is billed separately — gateway, bitswap and Sites traffic can surprise you despite the free-egress headline
• Vendor-stated 99% uptime and no public SLA: great value for non-critical and read-heavy workloads, a procurement problem for regulated ones

Sources

• https://filebase.com/pricing/
• https://filebase.com/docs/account/pricing
• https://filebase.com/docs/account/faq
• https://filebase.com/about
• https://filebase.com/object-storage
• https://filebase.com/blog/announcing-new-features-and-pricing-for-filebase
• https://filebase.com/blog/announcing-our-2m-seed-round
• https://linkedin.com/company/filebase
• https://gappsy.com/tools/filebase-com