Its not a secret that no ads on lemmy, which makes the process more difficult paying for hosting to keep your instance only, so tell me!
How do you fund your lemmy instance? do you sell products through lemmy? Donations? how you convince people to donate to your instance? Do you sell subscriptions? how?
I also run with the base VPS storage (25GB) and still have 5GB free (have other stuff running on the VPS besides Lemmy, but not very big either). Pict-rs supports object storage, so it would be trivial and pretty cheap to get a lot of good storage. Providers such as DO and Vultr (and the big players too ofc) provide about 250GB for $5/month, but I’ve heard a lot of great things about BackBlaze, which apparently bills $5 per TB… I’ve not tried it, so dunno.
Point being, storage isn’t really an issue :)