What you’re actually paying for, and why the bill keeps growing
Most Salesforce admins know the feeling: you check Company Information, see the storage bar inching toward red, and start wondering what you can safely delete. Storage warnings are one of the more expensive operational surprises in a growing org, and in 2026, with more visual content flowing in from field teams and customer portals, the bar fills up faster every year.
This guide walks through how Salesforce file storage pricing works in 2026, what it actually costs when you run out, and why teams that take visual content seriously are moving it out of Salesforce entirely.
How Salesforce File Storage Actually Works
Salesforce splits storage into three buckets, and confusing them is the first mistake most teams make.
Data storage covers your structured CRM records: accounts, contacts, opportunities, cases, and custom objects. Big Objects handle archival data at scale. The bucket that tends to catch teams off guard is file storage: the allocation used by every attachment, image, video, PDF, and binary file uploaded to your org.
By default, Salesforce provides 10 GB of file storage per org, plus 2 GB per user license on most editions. That sounds generous until you do the arithmetic. A single high-resolution inspection photo runs 5 to 10 MB. A short product walkthrough video can be several hundred MB. An org with 50 users producing visual content can drain its default allocation in a few weeks.
The Real Price of Running Out
When you hit your file storage limit, Salesforce doesn’t quietly let things slide. Admins receive system warnings, users may lose the ability to upload files, and in some cases org functionality begins to degrade. It’s a hard stop that interrupts real work.
The official fix? Purchase additional storage directly from Salesforce. In 2026, additional file storage is sold in 1 GB increments at approximately $5 per GB per month, which translates to $60 per GB per year. For an org consuming 100 GB of file storage (not unusual for a mid-sized company with active field operations), that’s $6,000 annually just for storage overhead, before any licenses, apps, or infrastructure costs.
But the price tag on the invoice is only part of the story. The hidden costs are often larger:
- Admin overhead: Time spent auditing, archiving, and deleting files to reclaim space
- User friction: Employees blocked from uploading, or forced into workarounds that break their workflow
- Lost data context: Files deleted to save space means lost visual history on records: inspection photos gone, signed contracts inaccessible, site documentation erased
None of these appear on a Salesforce invoice. All of them cost time and money.
Where Files Come From (And Why It Escalates Fast)
Understanding the storage problem means understanding where files originate. The usual suspects:
- Field service teams uploading job-site photos, before/after documentation, and equipment images
- Email-to-Case or email integrations that automatically attach every inbound message and its attachments
- PDF generation tools creating quotes, contracts, work orders, and inspection reports
- Customer portals where clients submit photos, receipts, or supporting documentation
- Marketing and product teams storing brand assets, product visuals, and promotional content
The key thing about visual files is that they’re disproportionately large compared to structured data. A Salesforce Opportunity record consumes a few kilobytes. The three photos, one video walkthrough, and signed PDF attached to that same opportunity? Easily 50 to 100 MB.
A technician doing five jobs a day with four photos per job generates about 200 MB. Twenty technicians, and you’re at 4 GB daily, which is past the default org allocation inside a week.
Real-World Example: A Field Operations Team Hits the Wall
Consider a mid-sized field service company running Salesforce, with technicians completing inspections, installations, or maintenance jobs daily. Each worker uses a mobile app to fill out structured forms: photos of equipment, site conditions, completed work, defects. Some jobs need short video walkthroughs.
This profile is increasingly common, and the storage numbers are sobering.
Based on current field app standards, an inspection photo averages about 5 MB (uncompressed or lightly compressed from a modern phone camera). One minute of 1080p video runs roughly 150 MB. A heavy field user capturing 50 photos and 2 minutes of video per working day consumes around 121 GB of storage a year. Salesforce’s default 10 GB org allocation is gone in under a month for a single power user. (Your numbers will be lower if the app compresses uploads aggressively, which most do.)
| User Profile Level | Photos/Day | Video/Day | Annual Storage |
| Intensive | 50 | 2 min | ~120 GB |
| Moderate | 25 | 1 min | ~60 GB |
| Light | 10 | 0 min | ~11 GB |
Scale that to a team and the numbers get uncomfortable fast. Five intensive users will burn through 100 GB in about two months. At Salesforce’s list overage rate, that team alone is looking at hundreds of dollars in monthly storage charges before the rest of the org is factored in.
A team paying $6,000 in overage costs in Year 1 typically doesn’t stay there. Storage usage tends to compound: headcount rises, documentation standards tighten, and file volume often grows 30 to 50% year over year. That turns a $6,000 problem in Year 1 into roughly $15,000 by Year 3, assuming nothing else changes.
Common Workarounds (And Why They Fall Short)
Faced with storage limits, most teams improvise. Unfortunately, most improvised solutions create new problems.
Manual deletion and archiving policies are the most common first response. Admins set retention rules, users are asked to clean up their files, and temporary relief is purchased at the cost of permanent data loss and ongoing administrative burden. It doesn’t scale.
Manually linking to SharePoint or Google Drive preserves the files but breaks the native Salesforce experience. Users leave the record to find the file, context is lost, and adoption falls off within weeks.
Custom-built integrations with AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage can work technically, but they require significant development investment, ongoing maintenance, and specialist knowledge to keep functioning as Salesforce updates its APIs. For most organizations, the total cost of ownership exceeds the cost of simply buying more Salesforce storage.
All three approaches share the same problem: they treat the symptom, not the cause.
SharinPix: External Visual Storage Built for Salesforce
SharinPix takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than managing file storage within Salesforce, SharinPix is a native Salesforce managed package that moves all visual file storage to an external, purpose-built infrastructure, all while making those files feel completely native inside your org.
What that means in practice: every image, video, PDF, 3D digital twin, or other visual asset is stored on SharinPix’s infrastructure, not inside Salesforce. But from any Salesforce record, users see and interact with those files exactly as if they were stored locally. No context-switching. No broken links. No degraded experience.
Because nothing is actually stored in Salesforce, the storage meter stops climbing.
SharinPix supports every major visual format out of the box: JPEG, PNG, RAW, HEIC, MP4, PDF, and emerging 3D and immersive formats for industries using digital twin technology. Storage scales with your needs without the $60-per-GB-per-year overhead.
For a team consuming 100 GB of visual content, the savings are immediate and measurable. More importantly, the workflow improves: files load faster, records are richer, and admins spend their time on higher-value work.
Beyond Storage: SharinPix as Your Visual Operations Layer
Solving storage is just the start. What makes SharinPix actually interesting is what becomes possible once your visual files are on the platform.
It turns Salesforce from a data CRM into a place where teams work with images, not just store them: capturing photos directly from mobile and attaching them automatically to the right record; resizing, cropping, annotating, and watermarking without leaving Salesforce; sharing visual content with customers or contractors through branded, controlled links.
For field teams, the offline mobile forms matter most. Structured visual data collection that works without a connection: photos, forms, all of it, syncing back to Salesforce the moment connectivity returns. That’s the kind of field capture that turns a CRM into an operational system of record.
Conclusion: Fix the Root Cause, Not the Symptom
Salesforce storage costs accumulate fast, and they compound faster than most planning cycles assume. If your team relies on photos, videos, and PDFs to do its work, the cost curve bends against you quickly.
The teams that handle this well aren’t running cleanup scripts every quarter or maintaining custom S3 pipelines. They figured out earlier than most that visual content doesn’t belong inside a CRM’s storage allocation.
SharinPix was built to solve exactly that: move visual files out of Salesforce storage, keep the native experience, and unlock a layer of visual operations a CRM alone can’t provide.ence your users expect, and unlocking a full layer of visual operations that a CRM alone can never provide.
Ready to see how much you could save?
Head on over to the Salesforce AgentExchange to learn more about SharinPix and chat with one of our Visual Experts, who will help you understand just how much you could be saving on Salesforce Storage costs.
