Neo SPCC proposes 50× storage price increase for NeoFS MainNet

Neo SPCC has proposed a set of economic parameter changes for NeoFS MainNet that would increase storage pricing by 50 times and container fees by five times. The proposal, published Oct. 14 as GitHub issue #4226, includes a two-week community feedback period running through Oct. 28.

The changes would represent the first adjustment to NeoFS pricing since the network’s original parameters were set. Neo SPCC cited shifts in $GAS pricing and hardware costs over the intervening years as the primary motivation, noting that current rates are unsustainable for storage node operators.

Proposed changes

Under the current parameters, NeoFS storage costs approximately US $0.000324 per GB per month at a $GAS price of $1.50, assuming a typical three-copy replication policy. The proposal would raise the storage price parameter from 100,000 to 5,000,000 picoGAS per GB per epoch, a 50× increase that would bring the effective cost to roughly $0.0162 per GB per month.

Container creation fees would increase five times, from 1,000,000,000 to 5,000,000,000 picoGAS, bringing the cost to approximately $0.05 per container, comparable to a standard Neo transaction. Container alias fees would see the most dramatic adjustment, rising to align with the scarcity model used by the Neo Name Service. The proposed alias fee of 0.63 $GAS (approximately $0.90) reflects that named containers, unlike hash-based container IDs, are a limited resource. The new setting matches the current TestNet configuration.

Withdrawal fees would remain unchanged at $10.50.

Per-object payment mechanism

The proposal also introduces a new per-object payment mechanism. Currently, users pay only for an object’s data payload, while metadata headers, limited to 16KB per object, are not charged. Under the proposed change, each stored object would incur a minimum charge equivalent to 16KB of storage regardless of actual header size.

Neo SPCC described this as a measure to close a potential abuse vector identified in issue #3608, where users could store large volumes of small objects with disproportionate metadata overhead. For typical usage, the impact would be minimal, adding roughly 0.4% overhead for a 4MB object.

Rationale, competitive positioning

Neo SPCC noted that typical industry storage costs range from $0.005 to $0.02 per GB per month depending on geographic distribution and access characteristics. The proposed $0.0162 rate would place NeoFS within that range while remaining competitive with other decentralized storage providers. Notably, NeoFS does not charge ingress or egress fees, a cost that major cloud providers levy in addition to storage, meaning the storage rate must account for total operational costs.

Users seeking to reduce effective costs further can make use of erasure encoding, which lowers the replication overhead compared to the standard three-copy policy.

Governance process

NeoFS economic parameters are stored in the Network Map contract on the NeoFS sidechain and maintained by Inner Ring nodes. The Neo Council appoints these nodes via the Designation native contract. Changes to network-wide parameters require Inner Ring consensus.

Neo SPCC has published the proposal publicly on GitHub for community input. According to the issue, if no alternative proposals emerge during the feedback period, the settings will be adjusted on Oct. 28 as outlined. Community members can provide feedback directly on the GitHub issue.

The full proposal can be found at the link below:
https://github.com/nspcc-dev/neofs-node/issues/4226