We built this for ourselves first

In May 2026 Storacha (formerly web3.storage) announced they were shutting down their IPFS gateway. The OctoPeeps NFT collection — 4,848 NFTs and the older 8,888 Octo Kiddos collection — was hosted there.

We had three weeks. The mainstream paid options all had the same shape: low base price, then bandwidth-based overage fees that scale painfully when your collection actually gets viewed. So we set up our own IPFS node on a €5/mo Hetzner VPS, migrated everything in a weekend, and updated our contracts.

When other NFT projects messaged us asking how we did it, we realised the same infrastructure could host their collections too — at honest prices, with unlimited bandwidth (which is what NFT collections actually need).

Octopin is that infrastructure productised. Same node, same Cloudflare R2 backend, same IPFS network — just opened up to other communities.

How we keep prices honest

Files live in Cloudflare R2. R2 has free egress. Cloudflare's CDN sits in front of our gateway and caches everything (IPFS content is immutable). So serving traffic costs us almost nothing — which means we can offer unlimited bandwidth on every tier without going broke.

Pinata's bandwidth fees are a relic of their AWS-S3-direct-egress architecture. We're not stuck with that, so we don't pass it on.

What's next

We want Octopin to be the default IPFS pin for NFT projects. Coming soon: bulk re-pinning from any IPFS provider, OctoPeeps-holder free tier upgrades, API keys for automated mints, and (eventually) Arweave/Filecoin as additional storage backends.