ClickUp Free Forever 60MB and 5 Spaces: when indies should buy Unlimited

When product, clients, and content ops share one ClickUp workspace, founders quickly ask whether Free Forever’s 60MB storage and five Spaces will hold. This tutorial is not a ClickUp versus Linear bake-off. It freezes Free Forever limits from clickup.com/pricing and the storage help article as of 2026-09-29, then names clear upgrade triggers for Unlimited. Re-check before you pay.

What Free Forever includes

Pricing lists Free Forever with 60MB storage, unlimited tasks, unlimited free plan members, 2FA, Docs, boards, sprint tools, and basic custom field management. The comparison table adds 5 Spaces, 40 Lists per Space, 1 Form, 3 Whiteboards, and automations capped at 5 active rules with 100 executions. Unlimited is about $7 per user per month yearly or $10 monthly, unlocking unlimited Spaces, Folders, Forms, and unlimited storage. Help Center clarifies that tasks do not consume storage—attachments, Chat uploads, cover images, and Clip recordings do. For most indies, 60MB hits first, five Spaces second, and 100 automation runs third.

Free Forever looks generous because it does not cap tasks or members. What actually bites is attachment volume and information architecture. A few product demos and export packs can exhaust 60MB. Splitting Spaces per customer burns the five-slot budget by month two. Automations used for demos instead of mainline work spend the 100 executions before you build discipline.

A five-Space skeleton

Use Product, Clients, Content, Admin, and Sandbox. Sandbox absorbs experiments; archive or empty it after each spike. Do not open a Space per customer—use Lists and tags. Spend the single free Form on external intake or bug reports; keep internal questionnaires as Doc templates. Stay within three Whiteboards and park dense diagrams in Excalidraw or Figma. Leave List headroom under the 40-per-Space ceiling by archiving stale Lists before minting a sixth Space.

Product holds mainline work and defects. Clients holds delivery and communication tasks. Content holds blog, social, and email drafts. Admin holds legal, tax, and infrastructure. Sandbox may stay messy if it has a cleanup day. Member count can be large, yet Free Forever guests lack fine-grained permissions and often get full edit access, so sensitive work should stay on external links instead of seating outsiders.

Attachments, Clips, and automations

Screenshots and short PDFs can live on tasks. Design packs, export videos, and long recordings should stay on external links. Clips and cover images count toward the 60MB budget, so check remaining storage before recording. Run a Friday attachment audit to delete duplicate screenshots and expired exports. Prefer written checklists over demo automations; reserve the 100 executions for low-risk repeats. Official FAQ language says hitting a use limit does not delete data, but you cannot create or edit more of that feature—confirm on the live help page.

If Zapier or n8n already carries heavy automation, keep ClickUp rules thinner. Use ClickUp for status transitions and reminders, and leave cross-system sync to external tools. Toolvori’s Zapier Free quota article is a useful companion when those runs matter more than in-app rules.

When Unlimited is worth it

Upgrade if attachments and Clips keep slamming 60MB, you need a stable sixth Space, Forms or automation runs block shipping, or you need paid guest permissions and native time tracking. Also upgrade when those signals appear for two consecutive weeks: storage alerts interrupt uploads, customer sprawl demands a sixth Space, the single Form is occupied by internal surveys, or automation executions empty mid-month.

Stay free if the five-Space skeleton works, external-link discipline holds, and checklists replace brittle automations. After upgrading, purge unused attachments and compare yearly $7 versus monthly $10. Re-check pricing the day you pay. If your real pain is issue tracking rather than multi-Space ops, evaluate Linear’s free-tier article instead of buying the wrong ClickUp upgrade.

Keep this separate from comparison posts

Other Toolvori articles cover project-tool selection and neighboring free tiers. This page answers only ClickUp Free Forever. Write Space naming and attachment rules into your handbook and re-verify quarterly. If Lists and tags remove the need for another Space, do not pay yet. State the purchase reason in one sentence, such as buying unlimited storage and a sixth Space.

Pin the official numbers for clickup-free-indie-storage-spaces with the observation date and URLs. When debates turn absolute—“free always works” or “you must upgrade”—open the pin. Limits change; discipline beats slogans. Use a checklist: two consecutive weeks at the wall, mainline delivery blocked, workarounds exhausted, and Unlimited features map to the blocker. In week one after paying, clear storage and Space boundaries so the paid capacity enters the mainline immediately.