On a “typical” Digital Ocean steady state install of Discourse, with the 1GB / 30GB minimum, I am seeing:
30.9% used of 29.40 GB = 9.08 GB used, 20.32 GB free
20.32 GB / 3 MB = 6,773 full size (3mb) images
20.32 GB / 2 MB = 10,160 medium size (2mb) images
So if you have say, 1000 members, and they upload on average 3 images per year per user (3,000 images/year), assuming an “average” image size of 2mb, that means you’d run out of disk space in about 3 years.
Clearly it depends heavily on
- size of your community
- what they are uploading
- how often they are uploading
But there’s some back of the envelope calculations that seem reasonable to me.