Frame.io Drive Won't Replace LucidLink or Suite Until Your Working Set Fits in 500 GB

Frame.io now mounts and streams projects, but Team's mounted quota is 500 GB. A 5-seat pricing model and a test plan before you cancel a cloud filesystem.

FThe Fix It In Post desk · Oct 3, 2026 · 5 min read

Cover illustration generated with AI for Fix It In Post.

Frame.io Drive mounts your review projects in Finder or Explorer and streams them into the edit, which makes a separate cloud filesystem look like paying twice. It isn't, for most teams, because the Team plan's mounted quota is 500 GB for the whole account. Keep Frame.io for review, and drop LucidLink or Suite only if your live working set fits in that half-terabyte.

What Frame.io Drive actually is

Adobe launched Frame.io Drive on 15 April 2026, starting with Enterprise customers and moving to other plans in phases. It is a desktop app that mounts Frame.io projects as a drive and streams media on demand, caching it locally. Adobe says it is built on Frame.io Mounted Storage using "streaming technology provided by Suite Studios". In other words, one of the products you might cancel is the engine inside the one you would keep.

Frame.io's getting-started guide gives the details the launch post leaves out:

It works with "any app that reads from a file system". The guide names Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve, and no plugin is needed.
You mount whole projects only, not folders, with up to 10 mounted at once, and you need download permission on each one.
It runs on macOS 13 or later and Windows 10 or later. The recommended spec is 16 GB of RAM, 250 GB of free SSD for cache, and Ethernet for 4K.
No offline mode. An internet connection is required for authentication and permissions.
Lock files propagate in under a second, and exports start uploading while they are still being written.

At IBC in September, mounted storage was reported as available on all accounts, and Frame.io for teams went month to month through Creative Cloud for teams. The pricing page bears both out.

The number that decides it: mounted quota

Mounted Storage is a separate quota from your regular Frame.io storage, and it is far smaller. According to Frame.io's help centre and pricing page, as checked on 2 October 2026:

Free: 2 GB mounted.
Pro ($15 per member per month, up to 5 members): 2 TB standard storage plus 2 TB per extra member, and 250 GB mounted.
Team ($25 per member per month, up to 15 members): 3 TB standard plus 2 TB per extra member, and 500 GB mounted.
Enterprise: 2 TB mounted, expandable through sales.

The mounted quota is counted across the whole account, not per user. Frame.io says you can buy more mounted capacity, but we could not find a published price for it. In our experience a single commercial shot on high-bitrate RAW can fill 500 GB with camera originals alone. Even a ProRes proxy workflow for a documentary series will hit it quickly once several projects are live.

An opened NAS: the box cloud-drive tools are trying to replace. Illustration generated with AI for Fix It In Post

A five-person boutique, priced

The following is our worked example, not a quote. Five editors and assistants share a 6 TB live working set and bill monthly. List prices were checked on 2 October 2026.

Frame.io Team alone: 5 × $25 = $125/month. That gives you 11 TB of review storage but only 500 GB you can edit from as a drive. It covers the 6 TB set only if you rotate projects in and out of the mount.
LucidLink Business: the pricing page lists $32 per member (shown discounted to $27 when we checked), with 400 GB included per member and extra storage at $8 per 100 GB. Five seats include 2 TB, so the extra 4 TB costs $320. Total at list: $480/month ($455 at the displayed discount). Egress is included.
Suite Managed: $75 per TB per month with five users included, so 6 TB = $450/month. Extra users cost $10 each.

Running Frame.io and a filesystem side by side costs $125 + $450 to $480, so roughly $575 to $605 a month. Moving the working set onto Frame.io's mount would save $450 to $480 a month, but only if the working set shrinks to 500 GB or Adobe sells you more mounted capacity at a price that beats Suite's.

When the separate filesystem still earns its fee

Working set over the mounted quota. This is the main case, and it covers most long-form and RAW-heavy work.
Folder-level structure. Frame.io mounts whole projects only. A filesystem lets you lay out media, project files, cache and renders however your pipeline expects.
Avid shared projects and other NLEs. Frame.io names Resolve as compatible, but makes no claim for Avid bin locking or Final Cut libraries. Test before you commit.
Existing archive in S3 or Dropbox. LucidLink's IBC update to Connect adds edit-in-place on connected S3, Dropbox and Frame.io sources, with a Publish step to write finished files back "coming soon". If that ships as described, LucidLink can sit on top of Frame.io rather than duplicate it.
Bring-your-own storage, onsite caching, SSO. On Suite these are Enterprise-only features, and on LucidLink BYO storage is Enterprise-only. Frame.io Team offers none of them.

A test plan before you cancel anything

Measure your real working set. Add up the live projects your team touched in the last 30 days. If the total is over 500 GB, stop here and keep your filesystem.
Mount one live project on a Team trial (capped at 250 GB mounted during the trial, per the pricing page). Use a real cache drive, not the system disk.
Cut 30 minutes in your actual NLE with your heaviest codec. Log every dropped frame and every cache fill on first play.
Have two editors open the same project from different sites and check that lock files behave the way your NLE expects.
Pull the network cable mid-session. With no offline mode, find out what your editor sees.
Ask Adobe for a written price on extra mounted storage at your target capacity, and compare it per TB with Suite's $75.

Which subscription to cancel

Working set under 500 GB, Adobe or Resolve, single project at a time: cancel the filesystem and run on Frame.io Team.
Working set over 500 GB, and Adobe's add-on price per TB beats $75: buy mounted capacity, run the test plan, then cancel.
Working set over 500 GB, no acceptable add-on price, or Avid shared projects: keep LucidLink or Suite, and keep Frame.io for review only.
Archive already in S3 or Frame.io: look at LucidLink Connect before migrating anything.

Prices and quotas move: mounted storage itself only reached every plan in September. Re-check both pricing pages before you renew.