LucidLink vs Suite Studios vs Shade: what each costs in 2026

LucidLink, Suite Studios and Shade sell the same thing on the surface: a cloud volume that mounts like a local drive and streams only the parts of a file your editing app reads. Underneath, they charge for it in three different ways, and that is what decides which one is cheapest for your team. Every price below was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 23 September 2026. I build JuiceMount, a self-hosted mount, so it appears at the end as a fourth option, and only for teams that already have a server on site.

The three at a glance #

Two rows matter more than the rest. The first is "how it charges": LucidLink and Shade meter people, Suite meters terabytes. The second is "your own storage": on all three, pointing the mount at a bucket you own is an Enterprise conversation, not a self-serve option.

What each one costs at four team sizes #

Four shapes of team, priced on the published rates. The totals are arithmetic, not quotes.

At small libraries the three are within a few dollars of each other. LucidLink is slightly cheapest up to about a dozen editors; past that Suite overtakes it, because Suite's extra users cost $10 and LucidLink's cost $27. At a large library the per-seat allowances run out: LucidLink's overage and Suite's per-TB rate land in the same place, near $9,000 a year for 10 TB, and Shade's self-serve plan stops publishing a price. Past 15 people, Shade Growth is not an option at all.

For the same 10 TB library priced across five vendors at 3, 5 and 10 seats, including Frame.io and Blackmagic Cloud, see what a mounted cloud drive costs.

Where LucidLink wins #

LucidLink is the most mature product of the three, and it has the widest reach. It ships iOS and Android clients alongside macOS, Windows and Linux, its self-serve plan goes to 25 members, and its pricing page says plans include egress, so reading footage does not add a second meter. Enterprise adds SSO, an audit trail and bring-your-own storage. If you need a distributed team working from one volume next week, with no hardware to buy, it is the safe choice.

The catch is the overage. Each member brings 400 GB, and past the pool storage bills at $8 per 100 GB a month. For a media team the library grows faster than the headcount, so the overage becomes most of the bill. We worked through that in our LucidLink pricing teardown, and what LucidLink's AI tooling adds is in LucidLink's AI features in 2026.

Where Suite Studios wins #

Suite charges for terabytes, not people. Five users are included and each extra user is $10 a month, so the more editors share one library, the better Suite looks: at 20 editors and 5 TB it is the cheapest of the three. It ships clients for macOS, Windows and Linux.

Two things have moved since we reviewed it. Our Suite Studios review from June priced a $40 per TB bring-your-own tier and listed Onsite Caching on both plans. On 23 September 2026 the pricing page lists both bring-your-own storage and Onsite Caching under Enterprise only, at a custom price. On the self-serve plan, every terabyte is $75 a month.

Where Shade wins #

Shade is the one to pick when finding the shot matters more than the storage bill. Unlimited AI indexing, transcription and face recognition are on the Growth plan, and natural-language search inside footage is the product's point. At five seats and a library under 2.5 TB, it costs about the same as the other two.

The limits are hard ones. Growth stops at 15 seats, the included active storage is 500 GB per seat, and the price of more storage is not published. Our Shade review covers the ShadeFS mount, offline pinning and the bring-your-own-S3 option in more depth.

The fourth column: only if you have a server on site #

All three products above keep your footage in their cloud and charge you every month to hold it. If your team works in one building and already has a NAS, or will buy one, there is another shape: a self-hosted mount that streams from your own server. That is what JuiceMount is, and it is ours, so here are the caveats first.

• macOS only, version 14 or later. All three SaaS products also run on Windows and Linux.
• Pre-1.0. You build it from source today.
• No managed service. You run the server, the backups and the failed disk.
• Multi-editor use is not soak-tested. Most testing so far has been single-editor, in the README's own words.

What you get for that: $0 per seat under Apache-2.0, LAN speed from a server in the room, and no per-terabyte meter. The costs are the hardware, the power and an offsite backup, and the calculator prices those against all three SaaS options. For a team with no server and no one who wants to run one, JuiceMount is the wrong answer, and one of the three above is the right one.

If you are still choosing between more than these three, our list of LucidLink alternatives adds iconik, Strada and Nextcloud.