Discord changes course and lowers its free upload limit to 10GB – how does this affect you?
In April 2023, I reported that Discord had fixed one of the biggest issues: increasing the free upload limit for file sizes in servers. It was a pitiful 8 MB for non-paying users for years, but was increased to 25 MB. Good news, right?
It was truly a sign that the extremely popular text and video chat social media site had finally paid attention to the vast majority of its users and their needs. Unfortunately, it recently paid attention to that need again, and not in a good way.
The official discord support page The support page, which outlines how Nitro Basic and Nitro — the site’s two paid subscription tiers — work, also includes a brand new clause explaining that Discord has lowered the upload limit from a juicy new 25MB to 10MB. According to the support page, “storage management is expensive” and “in order to maintain our service without sacrificing storage quality, we’ve decided to lower the upload limit for free files.”
Apparently, Discord analyzed how much storage space non-paying users actually use and found that “99% of users” tend to upload files smaller than 10MB. As a result, it decided to lower the storage limit to that amount. Of course, we’ll have to take Discord at its word here, since it hasn’t published the results of this study, but the reasoning for the change seems reasonable on the surface.
Storage is pretty expensive, and even more so for a site as heavily used as Discord. And then there’s the fact that once you upload a file, it’s permanently stored on the server unless you or someone with the right permissions deletes it. Discord looked at operational costs and average user site usage and came to a logical conclusion about what’s sustainable for the site, but it’s not really worth mentioning.
So why did Discord do this?
But again, if the vast majority of users don’t use more than 10MB of storage, why is it so cost effective to lower the upload limit? Is that reported 1% of users so high that Discord will shut it down in just over a year?
And then there’s the fact that if Discord had access to this user data now, it should have studied it in advance. Which begs the question: why didn’t it anticipate that the cost would be “too high” to pay?
Finally, when discussing this topic, it is important to mention Discord’s value. Because Discord is still a private company, it is not required by US law to report its finances.
There are however estimates of net worthwith its highest value of $14.5 billion in 2021 and the most recent estimate of $8 billion now. Either way, this company is worth quite a bit of money, which makes the statement “storage management is expensive” a bit odd.
What effect does it have on you?
It’s likely that a large majority of users won’t be affected by this storage limit rollback, as while file sizes have increased dramatically over the years, it’s still rare to find a file that even comes close to 25MB. On the other hand, for the same reason, it hardly seems worth changing this policy back to 10MB if the number of users uploading large files is really that small.
It seems like Discord is unnecessarily, well, stoking the fires of Discord by removing such a universally popular upgrade. Burying it on the support page without properly informing users of such a major change (since the official X account never reported it) isn’t a good idea either.
It’s so bad that I’ve even seen Discord users speculating that it would soon lower the upload limit for Nitro from 500MB to 250MB. While there’s of course no evidence that this will happen, it does point to the level of distrust this decision has already instilled among those who have used the site for years.
When we combine that with other negative news in the recent press, such as the updated Terms of Service with a mandatory arbitration clause, the layoff of 17% of the workforce, and changes to the AI policy, the company has been forced to take a step back. It is therefore more than understandable that this is a major focus.
Discord needs to seriously rethink its PR strategy when it comes to policy decisions. It’s an incredibly popular site used by millions of people, and it would be devastating for the gaming community to lose such an important asset if enough people distrusted it enough to affect its user base. And it’s not impossible.
After all, Skype was once synonymous with text, voice and video calling.