When developers first discover IPFS, the value proposition is immediately attractive: censorship-resistant, decentralized file storage that you can host yourself. No gatekeepers, no vendor lock-in, no recurring fees. Just install a node, run a command, and start pinning content.
At first, it feels empowering. But for many teams, the excitement fades fast — replaced by slow performance, rising infrastructure bills, and the sinking realization that running your own IPFS node is more work than expected.
Over the past year, I've helped dozens of developers transition from self-hosted setups to managed IPFS infrastructure. And in nearly every case, the story is the same: what began as a weekend side project quietly became a time sink, a budget leak, and a reliability liability.
Here's what they wish they had known earlier.
Self-Hosting Isn't Cheap
Running a reliable IPFS node in 2025 is no longer something you can do on an old laptop or a €5 VPS. IPFS demands resources — both in terms of hardware and bandwidth. At a minimum, you'll need a machine with 2 GB of RAM, multiple CPU cores, and a fast SSD. A 500 GB disk is barely enough if you're pinning active media content, and bandwidth spikes quickly when popular CIDs are fetched repeatedly across the network.
Once you go beyond the experimental stage, your hosting bill grows with you. On providers like Hetzner or Linode, expect to pay at least €30–40 per month for decent performance. If you're using cloud giants like AWS or Google Cloud, your monthly spend can easily reach €60 or more, depending on storage, egress, and uptime needs. Dedicated servers — often necessary for more serious use cases — push you into the €80–100/month range.
And infrastructure costs are only the beginning.
The Real Cost Is Your Time
What most developers underestimate isn't the server bill — it's the time investment. Setting up a production-ready IPFS node isn't just running ipfs init. You're responsible for everything: provisioning the server, hardening SSH, configuring firewalls, installing and tuning the IPFS daemon, integrating monitoring, setting up SSL and domains, and building a backup strategy.
That setup alone can take a full workday or more, especially if you want it done right.
But it doesn't stop there. A self-hosted node needs constant care. Disk space must be monitored, logs inspected, IPFS updates applied, and performance metrics checked. And that's when things are going well. When things go wrong — and they will — you become your own support desk. Storage fills up overnight. A content hash fails to resolve. Peers drop offline. Latency spikes. Suddenly, your "weekend project" turns into an emergency that hijacks your actual workday.
If your time is worth €50 per hour — a conservative rate for most developers — spending just 4 hours a month on maintenance already costs you €200. And that's without factoring in unexpected outages or debugging sessions.
You Become the Single Point of Failure
Self-hosting introduces a subtle but critical problem: you're no longer part of a distributed network — you are the network, for your content.
When your node is down, your content disappears. When your bandwidth is saturated, performance tanks. When your disk fails, you risk permanent data loss. There's no redundancy. No fallback gateway. No global peer distribution. You're responsible for every part of the stack, from uptime to disaster recovery.
And if your IPFS node is hosted in a single region, users across the world will experience slower retrievals due to limited peering. You don't get the benefits of IPFS's global distribution unless you architect that distribution yourself — with multiple nodes, replication, and traffic routing — all of which adds more cost and more complexity.
The Real Monthly Cost
When you add everything together — the hosting bill, the time spent managing the node, the performance penalties, and the operational risks — self-hosting IPFS rarely ends up cheaper.
In fact, it's often much more expensive.
Realistic monthly costs for self-hosting IPFS:
€30 to €80 per month in infrastructure
€200 to €800 per month in developer time
Plus the opportunity cost of not building features that matter to your users
Total: €230 to €880 per month — and none of that guarantees uptime, reliability, or performance.
There's a Simpler Way
This is exactly why we built Tarlo — a managed IPFS storage platform designed to give developers all the benefits of IPFS, with none of the maintenance headaches.
For just €15/month, Tarlo provides 250 GB of storage backed by professionally managed nodes, global content distribution, automatic replication, and 24/7 reliability. No setup, no patching, no stress. Your content stays available and fast — everywhere.
You focus on your app. We handle the infrastructure.
When Self-Hosting Still Makes Sense
To be fair, self-hosting isn't always the wrong move. If you're building tools that directly interact with the IPFS protocol, need full control over content placement for compliance, or have a dedicated DevOps team already managing your stack, running your own nodes can be justified.
But for the other 90% of teams — those building apps, tools, or sites that simply need reliable, decentralized storage — a managed solution is not only cheaper and faster, but more scalable.
Final Thoughts
The dream of self-hosting IPFS is seductive. But in 2025, it's rarely worth the hidden costs. Between infrastructure, maintenance, and downtime risk, it's a high-effort, high-cost path for most developers.
A managed solution like Tarlo offers a better balance: full IPFS compatibility, no operational overhead, and pricing that actually reflects the value you get — not the time you lose.