IPFS is just a routing protocol, it is not a storage protocol itself. Pinning just lets other nodes know that you're hosting a particular file. Anyone can oper

IPFS is just a routing protocol, it is not a storage protocol itself. Pinning just lets other nodes know that you're hosting a particular file. Anyone can operate a Filecoin or Arweave node. They are compensated for allocating harddrive space on those nodes with FIL or AR tokens. AR has the unique feature of 200 year storage, so it is certainly more expensive than B2. But currently you can store a substantial amount of data on Filecoin for free: https://nft.storage/ https://nft.storage/ (this is temporary promotional storage, but still, the pricing is competitive). They are stored on multiple nodes when you pay the fee. But of course, these services have a different purpose altogether than traditional cloud based infrastructure. They are designed to act as a censorship-resistant and long term archive. They don't have the low latency of CDNs or what have you. That's generally ok, because you will typically use FIL or AR as your archive layer and also publish the data to a cloud provider for hot storage access. It makes sense to use IPFS, then, so it can link all these sources together for the same content.