Pricing & Costs

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The best storage cost is no recurring cost.

Helix charges a single, one-time fee based on file size. No monthly subscriptions, no storage tiers, no surprise charges. Your payment covers permanent storage through Arweave's endowment model.

Your payment covers several components:

Arweave's pricing isn't based on monthly costs—it's based on a one-time endowment that generates returns to fund storage forever:

The key insight: storage costs decline exponentially (Moore's law), but endowment returns remain relatively constant. Eventually, the returns far exceed the costs, making permanent storage sustainable.

Before uploading, you'll see the exact cost. Here's how it's calculated:

// Get upload cost from Irys
async function getUploadCost(irys: WebIrys, fileSize: number) {
  // Irys returns cost in atomic units
  const priceAtomic = await irys.getPrice(fileSize);

  // Convert to SOL
  const priceSOL = irys.utils.fromAtomic(priceAtomic);

  return {
    bytes: fileSize,
    priceSOL: priceSOL.toNumber(),
    priceUSD: priceSOL.toNumber() * getCurrentSOLPrice(),
  };
}

// Example output:
// {
//   bytes: 1048576,        // 1 MB
//   priceSOL: 0.0000218,   // ~$0.005 at $230/SOL
//   priceUSD: 0.005
// }

Sample Costs

Note: Costs vary based on network conditions and SOL price. The table above uses approximate values for illustration.

Here is a comparison of Helix to traditional cloud storage over time:

To use Helix, you need SOL in your Solana wallet. Here's how to acquire some:

We believe in full transparency. Here's everything you pay:

Helix takes no additional fees. We're building for the ecosystem, not for extraction.