Layer 2 solutions that focus on ease-of-use and other properties to make these technologies become more mainstream are starting to emerge. One such solution is Filebase, which offers an S3 compatible abstraction layer to Sia, Storj and other decentralized networks. You can use any S3 compatible tool right out of the box, or simply drag and drop.
Filebase offers an abstraction layer to Sia, Storj and other decentralized networks. It's S3 compatible as well, so it plugs right into most NAS setups including Synology Hyper Backup and QNAP.
A lot of folks come to DO for their lower costs, especially for egress. However, this App Platform is charging $0.10 per GB for bandwidth overage. That's 10x the cost of running your own Droplet/K8s cluster.
The problem with Pinata is that they charge $150 per TB for their Individual plan. That's nearly 6.5x the cost of storing the data on S3. Sure it works, but that high barrier to entry pricing scares off a lot of people. Why not just use S3?
Meanwhile, we're still waiting for Filecoin to launch, and networks such as Sia have seized that opportunity and created great things like Skynet [1]. Skynet itself still has some overhead if you want to ensure data persistence and availability, but the cost is orders of magnitude lower. In addition, new layer 2 providers have emerged to address those gaps, such as Filebase [2]. They provide S3 compatible object storage that is backed by decentralized cloud storage. You get high availability (of the storage layer), geo-redundancy, and less than S3 pricing out of the box.
It is this type of offering where we are going to see the most impact and adoption as the underlying technology not only makes things more efficient, but cheaper too.
[1] https://filebase.com