How much storage does your team need?
Storage plans are sold in gigabytes; work happens in files. This converts one into the other.
Storage needed
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Added per month
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Added per year
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Formula: (people × files × size × months) ÷ 1024
What the number assumes
Design files, video and 3D models push the average size far above office documents. A team doing visual work should try 20 MB rather than 4. Version history multiplies this again if the tool keeps every version.
The formula defines the arithmetic. It does not define your business. A figure from this page is a starting point for a decision rather than the decision.
How to estimate storage growth
Storage need is the number of people creating files, multiplied by how many each produces in a month, multiplied by the average size, multiplied by the number of months you keep them. It grows linearly with time and with headcount, which is why it is invisible in month one and a line item in year two.
The figure this produces is the floor. Real usage is higher because of versions, thumbnails, previews, backups and the copies that exist because somebody duplicated a folder rather than branching it.
Why creative teams are a different case
General guidance about storage is written for organisations whose largest files are presentations. A studio working with video, layered artwork or 3D assets is in a different order of magnitude. A single project can exceed a year of an office team's entire output.
That changes which decisions matter. For an office team, storage is a rounding error and retention is purely a compliance question. For a creative team, where source material lives and how long it lives there is an architectural decision with a real budget attached.
Retention: the number that decides everything
Storage cost is dominated by how long you keep things, because the volume added each month never leaves. Doubling the retention period doubles the steady-state cost; halving it halves it. No amount of compression matters as much.
The right retention period is a business decision, not a technical one. How long after delivery might a client come back? What are you contractually obliged to keep, and for how long? What does your privacy notice already promise about deletion? Answer those, then let the arithmetic follow.
What the cost per gigabyte does not tell you
Egress. Many providers charge little to store and considerably more to take data out, which turns a cheap archive into an expensive one at exactly the moment you need it back. Check the retrieval price alongside the storage price, particularly for anything marketed as cold or archival.
The second omission is the time spent finding things. A team that cannot locate last year's project pays for that in hours, not gigabytes, and no storage tier fixes it. Structure and naming are worth more than capacity.
Where the cost actually lands in a creative pipeline
Source material dominates. Camera footage, raw scans, high-resolution photography and simulation caches are typically an order of magnitude larger than anything they produce, and they are also the least likely to be needed again. Splitting source from deliverables, different locations, different retention, is usually the single largest lever available.
Deliverables are small, permanent and worth keeping. Working files are large, temporary and worth keeping only until the project is signed off. Treating all three the same is what makes storage grow in a straight line forever.
Once the split exists the arithmetic can be run per class, and the answer changes: a long retention on deliverables costs very little, while the same retention on source material is what the budget is actually paying for.
Questions
Does deleting files free the space?
Not always immediately. Tools that keep version history or a trash period hold the bytes for a while after you delete, which is usually a feature and occasionally a surprise.
What about boards and projects themselves?
They are tiny next to the files on them. It is almost always the attachments that fill a plan.
How big are the files my team actually makes?
It depends entirely on the discipline. Office documents and design files are usually single-digit megabytes, layered artwork and 3D scenes run to hundreds, and video source material is in gigabytes per minute. Take the average from a month of your own project folder rather than from a general figure, because the spread is too wide for any rule of thumb to help.
Should I count versions?
Yes, and it is the reason estimates come out low. A file kept with its history occupies far more than the file, and a system that keeps every save can hold ten or twenty times the size of what you would see in a folder. Check your retention setting before estimating.
Is it cheaper to keep everything or to clean up?
Storage is cheap enough that deleting to save money is rarely worth anyone's time. Deleting to reduce risk usually is worth it, because data you no longer hold cannot leak, and personal data you no longer need should not be kept at all. Decide retention on the legal and risk grounds, then price whatever that policy implies.
Related calculators
Same corner of the arithmetic, different question.