Providers
Pricing pages change monthly and free tiers change without warning, so the durable questions about a pinning provider are structural: what happens to the content identifiers (CIDs) when the relationship ends, and how much code has to change to end it.
What actually differentiates them#
| Question | Why it decides things |
|---|---|
| Does it implement the Pinning Service API? | If yes, migrating is re-running requests against a different endpoint. If no, the integration is bespoke and so is the exit. |
| Does it announce to the routing layer, or only serve its own gateway? | Gateway-only retention makes the hostname load-bearing, and hostnames get retired. |
| Can the blocks come back as a content addressable archive (CAR)? | A bulk export is the difference between a migration and a re-upload from whatever originals survive. |
| Is there a second tier behind the pin? | Filecoin deals or equivalent turn “we say it is there” into something a third party can check. |
| How is bandwidth priced? | For read-heavy content the egress line dominates the storage line by an order of magnitude. |
The current field#
| Provider | Interface | Backed by | Distinguishing property |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pinata | own API plus the standard one at /psa |
its own infrastructure | built only for this; dedicated gateways on custom domains |
| Filebase | S3, plus the standard one | its own infrastructure, 3× replicated | existing S3 tooling works unmodified |
| Lighthouse | its own SDK and API | Filecoin or Walrus | encryption with programmable access conditions |
| QuickNode | its own REST API | its own infrastructure | already there if the node provider is |
| 4EVERLAND | the standard one | its own infrastructure | bulk CID import and .car parsing |
| Crust | the standard one, with a wallet signature | its own chain and staked nodes | no account and no invoice |
Running the node instead is the other option, and IPFS Cluster is what that looks like past one machine.
The graveyard#
Four shutdowns since 2023, all with the same shape:
| Service | What ended | When |
|---|---|---|
| Estuary | discontinued; estuary.tech and its API taken down |
July 2023, site April 2024 |
nft.storage Classic |
uploads and pinning; retrieval kept | 30 June 2024 |
| Cloudflare public gateway | cloudflare-ipfs.com stopped resolving to IPFS |
14 August 2024 |
| Infura IPFS | uploads 3 August, API and gateway 15 August | August 2026 |
| web3.storage and Storacha | the Pinning Service API, then IPFS entirely | 2024 onward |
The first four were free or heavily subsidised, run by an organisation whose main business was something else, and each gave a migration window measured in weeks. The fifth is a different shape and worth reading on its own: nothing shut down, the product was simply renamed twice and re-scoped until IPFS was no longer part of it. None of them lost data that anybody held a second copy of.
The pattern is not that these companies are unreliable. It is that pinning at a loss is a customer-acquisition line item, and line items get cut. A free tier is a subsidy with an unknown expiry, and the paid tier is the number worth pricing before anything is built on the free one.
An arrangement that survives the list above#
- Pin to two unrelated providers, both speaking the standard API, so switching is a configuration change and losing one is not an incident.
- Keep the originals, and keep the import parameters that produced the CIDs alongside them. Reproducing a CID needs the chunker and version settings, not just the file — see UnixFS.
- Publish
ipfs://references, not gateway URLs, wherever the reference outlives the deployment: contract storage, metadata, anything signed. - Check retrieval from outside, on a schedule, with the two commands under checking a service is doing its job.
None of that is expensive, and all of it is much cheaper before the notice email than after.
External links#
- IPFS ecosystem directory — the fuller list, including services not covered here
- IPFS docs: work with pinning services
- application-research/estuary — archived, with the discontinuation notice