I wrote this in 2023, and back then Dropbox Business was our answer for unlimited storage. That's changed.
The church is off Dropbox. We moved our media storage to a NAS.
I've left the cost comparison below exactly as it was, because it still holds up if you're weighing cloud options against each other. Just know the recommendation at the bottom isn't what we run today.
If you're making this call right now, here's the honest trade. Cloud is faster to set up and easier for a volunteer team to reach from anywhere. A NAS trades the monthly bill for a bigger cost up front and more of your own time keeping it running.
If you're like me and started taking photos and videos for your church, you probably bought a hard drive to store your files. When that filled up, you bought another. And another. Now you've got a stack of drives in a drawer and no idea what's on any of them.
That's a problem in a church specifically, because more than one person needs to find things.
This was our pick at the time. To get unlimited you need a Dropbox Business account with at least three users, which runs $24 per user per month, or $864 a year. As a non-profit we got 30% off, which brought it to $605 a year.
It works well in Finder, sharing is easy, and you control which files live locally and which stay online.
Google Drive used to do unlimited. Now that's enterprise only and they don't publish the price. For most churches the Business Plus plan gives you 5TB at $18 per user per month, and non-profits get 72% off, which lands at $5.04 a month.
Good option if 5TB covers you.
Most OneDrive plans cap at 1TB. OneDrive for Business Plan 2 does unlimited at $10 per month if you have at least five users, and non-profits can get it for $4.80 per user annually.
Makes sense if you're already in Microsoft 365.
Big cost up front, no monthly fee. A Synology four-bay with 10TB drives ran around $3,500 when I wrote this. You get local redundancy, but you're the one managing it, and you'll be replacing drives over time.
Dropbox at $605 a year with the non-profit discount was the best value for unlimited. Google Drive was the better call if 5TB was enough. OneDrive made sense for Microsoft churches. The NAS was for people who wanted full control and didn't mind maintaining it.
Three years later, the NAS is the one we went with.
Storage is half of this. The other half is your team knowing where files live and what to do with them without asking you. That's what the Church Notion System is built for. One hub that holds every role, every step, and every piece of context your volunteers need on a Sunday.
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