Why isn Zotero File Storage free for everyone?
Although on a per-user basis the cost of Zotero File Storage is quite low, in the aggregate it would be prohibitively expensive for the Zotero project to absorb the expense of providing petabytes of storage to its hundreds of thousands of users. The commodity costs associated with file storage and data transfer are potentially significantly higher than the overhead for developing and maintaining the Zotero client and server, services that have always been free for users. The Zotero project has never planned to monetize user data or otherwise profit from its users, and so there must be a means of recovering the costs associated with file storage.
