Arweave Permaweb Apps vs Filecoin dApps: Application Hosting

One-time, upfront payment for 200+ years of storage. This creates a predictable, sunk cost model ideal for static frontends, permanent archives, and NFT metadata where data must be guaranteed to exist forever. No recurring fees or renewal risks.

Competitive, market-driven storage prices via a decentralized network of storage providers. Offers dramatically lower costs for large, dynamic datasets (e.g., scientific data, video, backups). Use cases like Web3 gaming assets or DAO archives benefit from this scalable, pay-as-you-go model.

One-time, upfront payment for 200+ years of storage via the endowment model. This eliminates recurring fees and ensures your app's frontend and data remain accessible permanently. This is critical for archival dApps, permanent publishing platforms, and digital art galleries where link rot is unacceptable.

Upfront capital requirement can be significant for large applications. Storing 1GB costs ~$10-$15 upfront versus Filecoin's pay-as-you-go model. This creates a higher barrier for rapidly iterating MVPs or applications with massive, mutable datasets where long-term persistence isn't the primary goal.

Competitive, market-driven storage prices (~$0.0000016/GB/month) via a decentralized storage network. Ideal for scaling data-heavy applications like video streaming, scientific datasets, or backup solutions where cost-per-gigabyte is the primary constraint and data can be retrieved on-demand.

Storage deals have finite terms (e.g., 1 year) requiring renewal or replication. Managing this lifecycle and ensuring continuous data availability adds operational overhead. This is a challenge for "set-and-forget" applications that require the simplicity of a permanent, fire-and-forget storage layer.

One-time, perpetual storage: Pay once for 200+ years of data persistence via the endowment model. This matters for NFT metadata, historical archives, and permanent frontends where data deletion is unacceptable. Protocols like Mirror.xyz and ArDrive leverage this for uncensorable content.

Bundled compute with storage: SmartWeave contracts are stored on-chain and evaluated lazily by users, enabling truly permanent and composable logic. This matters for decentralized social graphs (everPay) and versioned applications where contract state must persist indefinitely alongside data.

Competitive, renewable storage pricing: ~$0.0000000015/GB/month, leveraging a decentralized storage market. This matters for scaling dApps with large datasets (like video, scientific data) or frequent updates. Tools like Web3.Storage and NFT.Storage abstract complexity for developers.

Verifiable deals and on-chain proofs: Storage deals are cryptographically verifiable (Proof-of-Replication/Spacetime). This matters for enterprise-grade data compliance, verifiable backups, and CDN-like retrieval via services like Filecoin Saturn and Lassie. Enables complex data workflows with FVM.

Higher retrieval latency and cost for large files: While permanent, fetching large datasets can be slower and more expensive than cached solutions. This matters for interactive, media-heavy dApps requiring sub-second load times. The ecosystem relies on gateways (like arweave.net) as a centralizing force.

Separate storage and compute layers: Building a full dApp requires orchestrating Filecoin (storage), IPFS (content addressing), and a separate L1/L2 for smart contracts (e.g., Ethereum, Polygon). This matters for teams seeking a monolithic, all-in-one stack and increases initial development overhead compared to Arweave's integrated model.