Pay Once. Keep Forever.
Every storage service you use today charges you on a schedule. Monthly. Annually. Automatically renewed until you cancel, migrate, or the company ceases to exist. Your data persists only as long as the payments continue.
Arweave works differently. You pay once when you upload. After that, your data is stored permanently by the network. No renewal. No subscription. No ongoing cost. The mechanism that makes this possible is called the storage endowment.
What It Costs You Today vs. Forever
Consider what you pay for cloud storage over time:
| Service | Monthly | Annual | Over 50 Years |
|---|---|---|---|
| iCloud (50 GB) | $0.99 | $11.88 | $594 |
| Google One (100 GB) | $1.99 | $23.88 | $1,194 |
| Dropbox Plus (2 TB) | $11.99 | $143.88 | $7,194 |
| iCloud (2 TB) | $9.99 | $119.88 | $5,994 |
And those numbers assume prices stay the same. They assume the company stays in business. They assume you never miss a payment. They assume no terms of service changes, no account lockouts, no policy shifts that delete your data.
On Arweave, 1 GB costs approximately $5 at current rates. One payment. No expiration. No renewal. The data outlives you.
How the Endowment Works
When you upload data to Arweave, the one-time fee you pay is split:
- ~5% goes directly to miners as an immediate reward for including your data in a block
- ~95% goes into the storage endowment, a protocol-enforced fund built into the blockchain itself
The endowment is not a company treasury. No team manages it. No board votes on how to spend it. It is a mechanism encoded in the protocol that automatically releases funds to miners over time in exchange for continuing to store and serve data.
No one can redirect these funds. No one can shut it down. It operates as long as the protocol operates.
Why It Works: The Declining Cost Curve
The endowment model is built on one of the most reliable trends in technology: storage costs decline roughly 30% per year. This trend has held for over four decades.
- In 2000, 1 GB of storage cost approximately $10
- In 2010, it cost about $0.10
- In 2020, it cost about $0.002
- The trend continues
Arweave's upload fee is calculated against a conservative projection of this decline. The fee assumes storage costs will drop more slowly than they historically have, building in a substantial safety margin.
The result: the endowment's purchasing power grows over time. Even as it pays miners, the declining cost of storage means each dollar in the endowment buys more storage capacity with every passing year. Under conservative assumptions, the endowment sustains data replication for 200+ years. Under historical trends, it lasts indefinitely.
Your Data Outlives Companies
Think about the services you've used over the past two decades. How many still exist? How many changed their terms? How many deleted your content?
- GeoCities: deleted by Yahoo in 2009
- Google+: shut down in 2019
- Vine: shut down in 2017
- MySpace: lost 12 years of music uploads in a server migration
- Photobucket: paywalled all user images behind a $400/year subscription
Every centralized storage provider operates on the same fundamental model: your data exists at their discretion. If the business model changes, if the company is acquired, if priorities shift, your data is collateral.
Arweave's endowment eliminates this dependency. There is no company to go bankrupt. There is no subscription to lapse. There is no terms of service to change. Your data is maintained by a decentralized network of miners who are economically incentivized to store it, funded by a protocol mechanism that no entity controls.
Beyond the Current Timescale
No other storage provider on earth guarantees availability beyond their current billing cycle. AWS commits to 99.999999999% durability, but only as long as you pay. Google's terms of service explicitly state they can terminate your account. Apple's iCloud agreement reserves the right to delete data from inactive accounts.
Arweave's endowment is designed for a timescale that no company can promise: centuries. The protocol does not depend on any organization's continued existence. It does not depend on anyone's continued willingness to pay. It does not depend on a favorable business environment or a supportive regulatory climate.
It depends on two things: miners running nodes (because it's profitable) and storage costs continuing to decline (because they always have).
Proof of Access: Why Miners Store Your Data
Miners earn rewards by proving they store data. Arweave uses Succinct Proof of Random Access (SPoRA), a consensus mechanism that requires miners to demonstrate access to a randomly selected chunk from the entire history of the blockweave.
The more data a miner stores, the more frequently they can produce valid proofs, and the more rewards they earn. This creates a direct economic incentive for high data replication across the network, without any central coordination.
The result: your data is not stored in one place. It's replicated across hundreds of independent nodes worldwide, accessible through the gateway network. If any node goes offline, the data remains accessible through the rest of the network.
Comparison to Every Alternative
| Model | Payment | Duration | What Happens When Payment Stops |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS / Cloud | Monthly | While paying | Data deleted after grace period |
| iCloud / Google | Monthly | While paying | Data deleted from inactive accounts |
| IPFS Pinning | Monthly / Annual | While paying | Data unpinned, eventually lost |
| Filecoin | Per-deal (6-18 mo) | Contract term | Data may not be renewed |
| Arweave | One-time | Permanent | Endowment continues paying miners indefinitely |
The Bottom Line
The endowment is what makes Arweave's permanence claim credible. It is not marketing. It is not a promise. It is a concrete economic mechanism, verifiable onchain, that ensures miners are compensated for storing data long after the original uploader has moved on.
Your photos. Your documents. Your creative work. Your records. Stored once, kept forever, without depending on any company's continued existence or your continued attention.
The endowment has been accumulating since Arweave's mainnet launch in June 2018. As storage costs continue their decades-long decline, the protocol's ability to sustain permanent storage only strengthens.
Pay once. Keep forever. That is the endowment.