Arweave vs Filecoin: Permanent Web Hosting

One-time, upfront payment for 200+ years of storage. Arweave's endowment model guarantees data persistence by paying miners from a locked endowment. This is ideal for NFT metadata, critical archives, and protocol frontends where data must be immutable and accessible forever.

Higher initial cost for permanent access. Paying for centuries upfront is more expensive than short-term contracts. This is less optimal for highly mutable data, temporary backups, or applications requiring frequent large updates where recurring micro-payments are preferable.

Dynamic, verifiable storage deals with competitive pricing. Users bid for storage from a global network of miners, driving down costs. This is optimal for cold storage, enterprise backups, and large datasets (e.g., scientific data, film archives) where cost-per-GB is the primary driver.

Requires active deal management and renewal. Data is stored on renewable contracts (e.g., 1-year terms). This introduces operational overhead and liveness risk if deals lapse, making it less ideal for "set-and-forget" applications or fully decentralized frontends that must remain live without maintenance.

One-time, upfront payment for 200+ years of storage. This creates a predictable, sunk cost model ideal for NFT metadata, legal documents, and critical application state where data must be guaranteed immutable and accessible forever. The endowment model (paying for future replication costs upfront) is a unique economic innovation.

Higher initial cost for permanent storage versus Filecoin's recurring model. This can be less economical for large-scale, mutable, or temporary data like user-generated content backups or raw sensor data. The model assumes the endowment will cover centuries of costs, which carries long-tail financial risk.

Dynamic, verifiable storage marketplace with prices set by supply and demand. This enables cost-optimized storage for petabytes of cold data, archival backups, and large datasets (e.g., scientific research, media libraries). Clients can choose from a global network of storage providers based on price and reputation.

Requires active deal renewal and ongoing payments (typically every 1-1.5 years). This introduces operational overhead and uncertainty for truly permanent assets, as data can be lost if deals lapse. It's better suited for organizations with active data lifecycle management.

Pay-as-you-go model: Storage costs are determined by a decentralized storage marketplace, with current rates around $0.0000000019/GB/second (~$0.06/GB/year). This matters for large-scale, mutable data where cost optimization is critical, such as archival backups or enterprise datasets.

Renewal & repair overhead: Data is stored on 1-5 year deals requiring active management for renewal. This matters for true permanent storage use cases like legal documents or foundational NFTs, where the risk of data loss from lapsed deals is unacceptable.

One-time, upfront payment: Pay once for 200+ years of guaranteed storage via the endowment model. This matters for permanent web hosting, dApp frontends, and immutable NFTs where data must be accessible indefinitely without ongoing management.

Less flexible pricing: The endowment model requires a larger initial capital outlay. This matters for volatile or frequently updated data where the long-term guarantee is overkill and Filecoin's variable pricing offers better capital efficiency.