What a mounted cloud drive really costs at 3, 5 and 10 seats

Every vendor in this category publishes a price that is true and a bill that is different, and the gap is not dishonesty. It is that they meter different things. Some charge for people. Some charge for terabytes. A few charge for both, and one of the two dominates so completely that the other is noise.

So here is one fixed scenario, priced five ways. Ten terabytes of media that people need to open, at three, five and ten seats. Every rate below was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 16 August 2026, the URLs are at the bottom, and the arithmetic is shown line by line so you can check it rather than trust it.

I build a free, self-hosted alternative, which is a conflict of interest I would rather declare in the second paragraph than bury. The way I try to keep it honest is by showing the sums.

The one assumption, stated up front #

Ten terabytes billed as 10,000 GB. LucidLink and Suite meter per gigabyte or per terabyte, and whether a vendor means 1,000 or 1,024 gigabytes to the terabyte changes the total by about 2%, which is smaller than the rounding in any real decision. Where a vendor publishes per-100-GB pricing, I use it exactly as published.

Everything is monthly billing at the rate shown on the page today. Where a vendor advertises an annual discount without publishing the annual per-seat figure, I say so rather than compute a number the vendor did not print.

LucidLink #

The company that invented this workflow, and it has an Engineering Emmy for it. Business is $32 per member per month list, currently shown at $27, with 400 GB of shared storage per member and overage at $8 per 100 GB per month. Egress is included with the bundled AWS storage, which matters more than it sounds, because egress is where cloud storage bills usually surprise people.

Look at the last column. LucidLink gets slightly cheaper as the team grows. That is not a typo. Included storage is granted per member, so at a fixed library size each extra seat brings 400 GB of included capacity that costs less than the overage it displaces. It is a genuinely seat-friendly structure, and it is the opposite of what people assume about per-seat pricing.

The flip side is the one every LucidLink customer eventually meets: at these ratios the seats are rounding error and the storage is the bill. Ninety percent of that $9,300 is capacity. We wrote the full teardown separately in LucidLink in 2026, the real bill.

Genuinely good at: the mature product in the category, zero-knowledge encryption on every tier, egress included, and a client that large facilities have hammered for years. If your requirement is "this must work for a distributed team on Monday," this is the safe answer.

Suite Studios #

Suite prices the other way round: capacity first, people almost free. The Managed plan is $75 per terabyte per month, with five users included at no charge and additional users at $10 per user per month. Bring-your-own-storage is offered as an option on the Managed plan.

The structure is clean and easy to forecast: your bill is your library, plus a rounding error for headcount. If your team is small and your library is large, you are paying almost purely for terabytes. If your team is large and your library is small, Suite is remarkably cheap.

Genuinely good at: the streaming engine. Adobe chose it. Frame.io's own knowledge center says Frame.io Drive "was created in partnership with Suite Studios," which is about as strong a technical endorsement as a competitor can receive. Five free users on the entry plan is unusually generous, and the bring-your-own-storage option means custody is at least negotiable.

Shade #

Shade sells seats with capacity attached. Growth is $29.75 per seat per month on annual billing, shown against a regular $35, with 500 GB of active storage per seat, a ceiling of 15 seats, up to 150 guests, and unlimited AI indexing included rather than sold as an add-on.

That "per seat" attachment is the thing to read carefully.

At every seat count in this scenario, a 10 TB active library is past what the published Growth tier includes, and Shade does not publish an overage rate. So the honest answer for this scenario is not priceable from the public page: you would be talking to their sales team, and the number would be a quote rather than a rate. I am not going to guess at it, because guessing at a competitor's price is exactly the mistake this article exists to avoid.

What the table does show fairly is that if your active working set fits inside the seat allowance, Shade is dramatically cheaper than the capacity-metered products. A five-person team with 2 TB of active media pays $1,785 a year here against roughly $9,000 there. The word doing the work is "active": Shade's model assumes a working set, not an archive.

Genuinely good at: search inside the footage. Shade's AI indexing is included rather than metered, and finding a shot by what is in the frame is a different and harder problem than finding it by filename. If that is your bottleneck, none of the pure storage vendors here compete.

Frame.io #

Frame.io is the cheapest seat on this page and the smallest mount, and both facts follow from the same design decision. Team is $25 per member per month. Annual billing is advertised as "Save 13%", but Frame.io does not print the annual per-seat figure, so I will not either.

The number that matters for a mounted-drive comparison is Mounted Storage, which is separate from and much smaller than account storage: Free 2 GB, Pro 250 GB, Teams 500 GB, Enterprise 2 TB.

Additional mounted storage is purchasable, and Frame.io does not publish the rate publicly, so this scenario is also a quote rather than a price. What the table honestly shows is that Frame.io Drive is not sold as a home for a 10 TB library. It is sold as a mount for the project in front of you, attached to a review tool you were buying anyway.

Genuinely good at: review and approval, by a distance nobody else in this list is close to. Frame-accurate comments, version stacks, and a link a client opens without an account. The mount is a capable addition to an excellent product, not a storage product that grew a review feature. We covered it in detail in Frame.io Drive versus a self-hosted mount and, earlier, in Frame.io as storage and review.

Blackmagic #

Blackmagic is the one I cannot complete, and I would rather say that than fill the gap with a number I found somewhere else.

What is verifiable on Blackmagic's own pages is the hardware. Cloud Pod at $445. Cloud Store Mini at $5,059 for 8 TB and $8,435 for 16 TB. Cloud Store Max at $15,745 for 24 TB. Cloud Store Ultra at $16,309 for 24 TB. DaVinci Resolve Studio 21 at $295. The product page states the hardware carries no subscription and no monthly licence fee, which is a real and unusual position in 2026.

What is not verifiable on any public Blackmagic page I could reach on 16 August 2026 is the per-terabyte rate for Blackmagic Cloud online media storage. The DaVinci Resolve collaboration page says only that cloud collaboration is charged based on monthly usage. The actual rate appears inside the signed-in Blackmagic Cloud console. Third-party figures circulate freely, including some that are now well over a year old. I am not putting one in a table on this site, because a stale competitor price is the exact credibility failure this blog has a rule against.

One thing worth separating, because it is a common source of confusion: DaVinci Resolve's project sharing and Blackmagic Cloud's media storage are two different products. The project server shares the database of projects, timelines, bins and grades. It does not move your media; every workstation still has to reach the footage by its own path. So a project server plus a NAS is a complete answer, and a project server on its own is not.

Genuinely good at: a hardware-first model with no recurring software fee, deep integration with Resolve, and an ecosystem that goes from camera to delivery. If your shop is Resolve end to end, the gravity here is real.

The self-hosted line #

For completeness, and with the bias declared.

That column of zeros is accurate and it is also incomplete, so here is what it leaves out. You buy the NAS, or you already own one. You pay for the drives, the power, and the switch. You do the updates. You size the array, plan the backups, and answer the phone when it breaks on a Saturday. A subscription is, in part, a purchase of somebody else's Saturdays, and that is a legitimate thing to want.

The comparison that means anything is therefore not "$0 versus $9,300." It is a one-time capital cost against a recurring one, which is a payback question with a specific answer for your library size and your headcount. The calculator does that arithmetic, including the cases where it tells you to keep the subscription.

What the table actually teaches #

Three things, none of which is "vendor X is cheapest."

One: there are two meters, and you must know which one you are on. Capacity meters (LucidLink at these ratios, Suite) make headcount nearly free and terabytes expensive. Seat meters (Frame.io, Shade) make terabytes the constraint and headcount the bill. Pick the meter that matches the shape of your problem and the vendor choice mostly follows.

Two: a per-seat price is not a per-seat bill. LucidLink is the clearest case: the seat line is $270 a month at ten people and the storage line is $480. Reading "$27 a member" and multiplying by your headcount will understate the bill by a factor of three.

Three: check the capacity ceiling before the price. Two of the five products in this article cannot hold a 10 TB library on their published tiers at any seat count in this scenario. That is not a criticism; they were built for a working set rather than an archive. But it means "which is cheapest" was the wrong first question. Which of these can even hold my library is the first question, and it eliminates candidates faster than price does.

The honest caveats #

• Every figure here has a date on it, and the date is the point. Pricing in this category moved materially in the twelve months before this was written. If you are reading this more than a quarter after 16 August 2026, treat the numbers as a method rather than an answer, and re-check the pages linked at the bottom.
• I have not priced the extras. Support tiers, SSO, audit logs, guest seats, egress on bring-your-own-storage arrangements, and migration assistance all cost money at some vendors and nothing at others. The tables above are base plans against one scenario.
• List price is not enterprise price. Every vendor here will discount at volume. If you are buying ten seats, ask.
• I sell against these products. Read the sums, not the adjectives.

If you want the "which should I choose" version rather than the "what does it cost" version, LucidLink alternatives in 2026 frames it as five questions, and JuiceMount versus the SaaS suites separates the four jobs these products keep getting sold as one. And if what is actually pushing you toward a subscription is that your current share feels slow, read why SMB browsing feels slow on a Synology or QNAP first, because that particular problem is often free to fix.

Every price, with the page it came from, all read 16 August 2026

• LucidLink: lucidlink.com/pricing. Starter $7 per member per month, 100 GB shared per member, overage $7 per 100 GB per month, up to 10 members. Business listed at $32 and shown at a current price of $27 per member per month, 400 GB shared per member, overage $8 per 100 GB per month, up to 25 members. Enterprise custom. 15% annual discount advertised. Egress included with the bundled AWS storage; zero-knowledge encryption on all tiers.
• Suite Studios: suitestudios.io/pricing. Managed plan "$75/TB" per month, "Included Users, 5 Free", additional users "$10/user/month", bring-your-own-storage listed as optional. Enterprise custom. 14-day free trial.
• Shade: shade.inc/pricing. Growth $29.75 per seat per month on annual billing, shown against a regular $35, with 500 GB active storage per seat, up to 15 seats and up to 150 guests, one workspace, unlimited AI indexing. Enterprise custom, 1 TB active storage per seat, unlimited seats, up to 250 guests. No storage overage rate is published.
• Frame.io: frame.io/pricing. Free $0; Pro $15 per member per month; Team $25 per member per month; Enterprise custom. Annual billing advertised as "Save 13%" with no annual per-seat figure shown. Mounted Storage entitlements confirmed in the Frame.io V4 Knowledge Center, Getting Started with Frame.io Drive & Mounted Storage: Free 2 GB, Pro 250 GB, Teams 500 GB, Enterprise 2 TB.
• Blackmagic Design hardware: blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagiccloudstore. Cloud Pod $445; Cloud Store Mini 8TB $5,059 and 16TB $8,435; Cloud Store 20TB $15,065 and 80TB $53,895; Cloud Store Max 24TB $15,745 and 48TB $24,745; Cloud Store Ultra 24TB $16,309 and 48TB $25,425; Cloud Dock 2 $649; Cloud Dock 4 $1,575; Cloud Backup 8 $1,755; DaVinci Resolve Studio 21 $295. The page states the hardware carries no subscription or monthly licence fee.
• Blackmagic Cloud online storage, not verified: no per-terabyte rate is published on any public Blackmagic Design page we could reach on 16 August 2026. The DaVinci Resolve collaboration page states only that cloud collaboration is charged based on monthly usage; the rate appears inside the signed-in Blackmagic Cloud console. Third-party figures circulate, and this article deliberately does not quote them.
• JuiceMount: Apache-2.0, no per-seat or per-terabyte charge, source at github.com/lelanddutcher/juicemount. Hardware, power and your own time are the cost.